This is another Monday, "Notes Along the Way" post. Chronologically, the material here is just prior. My last Monday post is here.
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1. Asbury Seminary introduced me to a whole new level of professors. The professor who most took me under his wing was David Bauer. His intellect was so incisive. His approach so objective, comparatively speaking. He modeled a scientific rigor in pursuing the meaning of the biblical text that I found excilarating.
Teaching at IWU for some twenty years, I often felt the pressure of boundaries -- landmine topics to avoid. Much of this was probably self-inflicted, but I felt like I knew what subjects were most dangerous. I was always amazed at how Steve Lennox could march into a controversial subject with such confidence and emerge unscathed. Bud Bence, with a 1990s Houghton mindset dancing in his head, almost felt like he had to shake you some or you weren't getting your money's worth.
At the same time, he also had the fairly recent David Meade affair in the back of his head. A professor at Houghton, Meade had taken the position that Paul did not write the Pastorals and that several other books of the Bible were not written by the names on them. Harold Lindsell, of the Battle for the Bible fame, had written someone on the board (I think) sounding the alarm that Houghton was deviating from its evangelical glory.
When President Dan Chamberlain went to China for a semester, I understand he left instructions with Bud to fire Meade. (He himself was under pressure from the GBA of The Wesleyan Church, I believe.) Bud was the VPAA at Houghton at the time. Bud carried out the charge. From what I understand, Meade and the faculty fought back under the banner of academic freedom. That's a losing battle at a confessional school where the creed of the school is part of an agreement to come teach there.
[Admittedly, the Wesleyan Church has no creedal line on pseudonymity. In theory, Meade only needed to affirm that the Pastoral letters were truthful and that it was a genre question not a true/false question. But instead, I understand he took the position "I'm the expert and should be allowed to follow the truth wherever it leads." Lennox, also a Houghton grad, has suggested to me that Meade's attitude tanked him more than his position. I of course was not present for any of those controversies to have a first hand opinion.]
The faculty never forgave Bud for firing Meade, and the next chance they got, they pressured Chamberlain into pushing him out. All the way around, he seemed a scapegoat. Bud felt deeply wounded and betrayed. Of course, IWU was so much the better for it. I apologize if I have massacred any of these details.
So Bud was a little nervous hiring me at IWU. He was the Division Chair of Religion when I was hired at IWU. I had also studied at Durham with Jimmy Dunn just as Meade had. (I've never met Meade. Dunn said he would never write a reference for me if Houghton ever wanted to hire me. It was a little bit of a joke when I went to work there in 2019.)
Years later, Bud would apologize to me for his fears about me (he of course had no reason to apologize). He indicated it turned out I am much more conservative than he is. :-)
All of that is to say that, in teaching, my hope was that if I taught students how to read the Bible in context -- how to listen to it and let it tell you what it meant -- then I wouldn't have to make controversial claims about what it meant. It would make all its claims for itself.
In practice, of course, few of my students really became fully inductive. Some did. The bread crumbs I thought I left for them to follow rarely led them anywhere different from where they started. Our paradigms are persistent. We see what our paradigms want us to see. This applies to scholars as well.
2. This "scientific method" approach to the Bible was very attractive to me at Asbury. It fit with my love of science in high school and my first year of college. And the "English Bible" method at Asbury, so ably modeled by Bauer, was quintessentially scientific in its approach.
First, you ask what the text says. You don't ask what it means yet. You absolutely do not apply it yet. You start by simply observing. What does the text say?
Then you ask what the words meant. This is a matter of its first meaning, not what the words seem to mean today. You do a word study, looking at the other places a word is used in the same language (Greek, Hebrew. or Aramaic). On a more general question, you gather evidence. In good Baconian fashion, you create a table with evidence and possible inferences.
After exhausting evidence from the text itself, you now bring in possible historical background. You need to be careful, because the ancient world was a vast foreign country, and we only have the barest of artifacts from it. It is incredibly easy to see parallels that aren't really parallels. Only after you have done all the inductive work yourself do you bring in commentaries, which are just as likely to cloud your mind.
Now, finally, only after you have some sense of what it meant to its first audiences, do you begin to think about applying the text to today. You look for continuities between that time and our time. You also note the discontinuities. As Hays and Duvall put it, you "cross the principlizing bridge" by identifying biblical principles that you then reapply in contemporary contexts and situations.
This all smacks of modernism. This was the 80s, and postmodernism had not yet really hit. I'm all the more grateful it hadn't. Although I would come to appreciate the hermeneutical chastisement of postmodernism, it provides no real method for determining the meaning of the text. It is an incredibly helpful footnote but shouldn't be the main text. It's a muddle by its very nature. I suppose I'll get to that.
Although the inductive method I just set out is not foolproof -- not by far -- it is consummately reasonable.
3. It was also quite different from the method I grew up with, which I would come to categorize as "pre-modern." My mother's approach to interpretation -- without of course her ever knowing it -- amounted to "How can I make the evidence fit the conclusions I already have?" Her conclusions, of course, were provided by her tradition, the Pilgrim Holiness tradition.
The default for American Christians who have grown up in church is basically the same. How can we argue for the position of our group? It is a tribal hermeneutic, perfectly predictable. It's how if you're a Baptist, surprise, the Bible teaches Baptist things. If you're a Lutheran, the Bible teaches Lutheran things. And yes, if you're a Wesleyan, the Bible teaches Wesleyan things.
Of course in a Google, YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok age, we hear a lot more than what my mother heard in her bubble growing up. In a world of verse quoting, it's easy to be affected by other traditions. The "non-denominational" church near you is basically Baptist. I always smile when some church naively thinks it's just following the Bible. Such comments simply show that the church is unreflective of its own influences and traditions.
But this would become the most important question of my first year at seminary. Would I read the Bible in a way that tried to make it say what I had grown up hearing it said? Or would I read it inductively and let it tell me what it said?
[Note that the Meade controversy didn't distinguish between the question of truth and the question of politics. Meade thought that teaching at a confessional school was a question of truth. It is -- within whatever the boundaries of the institution are. But the question of an institution is also a question of politics, which he failed at that time.]
4. Going back to college, I was struck by the clash between my pre-modern paradigm and the modernist paradigm that I would adopt at Asbury. While studying to test out of New Testament Survey, I was struck by the way Merrill Tenney's New Testament Survey talked about matters like where Thessalonica was located or what its place in the Roman Empire was. These things seemed completely irrelevant to me.
Why? Because reading the Bible at that time to me was a matter of taking an individual verse and reading the words in the light of my holiness theology. Without realizing, I understood reading the Bible to be a mirror reading of what I already thought. And I read in the King James version, as I'll soon discuss. Each verse was listed by number, not in paragraphs.
This led me to have what you might call a "memory verse" approach to the Bible. Each verse was ripped from its context and made into a philosophical proposition. The definitions I brought to each word were Pilgrim Holiness definitions -- not definitions from the Greek and Hebrew worlds in which those words were first written.
It was a completely sincere question I had back then. What does historical context matter in interpretation? Don't we just read the words and do what they say? If 1 Corinthians 11 says a woman shouldn't cut her hair, then shouldn't women not cut their hair? Funny how I didn't apply that question to greeting one another with a holy kiss!
5. A quick example of the paradigm shift I was about to undergo. My senior year of college, I wrote an honors project on the psychological aspects of holiness. It was quite impressive for the world of my background. I argued that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were second works of grace, experiences of entire sanctification. There was a day when you could still find it in the library at SWU.
At Asbury later on, under an independent study with Dr. Bauer, I would go through those same passages inductively and conclude they were all initial experiences of the Holy Spirit (except in Acts 4 of course). This was my transition from being a sectarian, traditional scholar to a more "objective," inductive scholar. I suspect that study helped me become a Teaching Fellow at Asbury. And it probably set me on a course to study with James Dunn at Durham.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
