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 without exactly keeping the law.

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. I suspect he and other Jewish Christians continued to observe Saturday as a Sabbath.

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. That's really the category in which personal convictions go. It's wrong for me, but it might not be wrong for someone else. Paul says that, on this issue, what is important is that you are fully convinced in your own mind (Rom. 14:5).

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.

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. 

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 -- Asbury 1.4: Evidence and Reason

Here's the previous bread crumb.

1. I hit a small crisis of faith at the end of my first year at Asbury. I was learning to read the text of the Bible in context. It felt very familiar because it was basically the application of the scientific method to interpretation. Given the literary and historical evidence, what is the most likely meaning of the text?

I have taught this method for the last thirty years at IWU and elsewhere. David Smith now travels around teaching it from church to church. People who love the Bible usually love it because it so obviously does its best to listen to the Bible and let it say what it says.

For me, it came with a problem. The more I listened to the text, the more it unraveled the biblical interpretations of my childhood. Indeed, the more it called into question some of the core assumptions I had about the Bible.

2. What day is the Sabbath? It’s clearly Saturday in the Old and New Testaments. I heard an ingenious interpretation once of the idiom, “the first of sabbaths” in Mark 16:2 and Matthew 28:1. The phase basically means the first day of the week. But one of the professors at Frankfort Bible College suggested it meant that these verses were declaring that Sunday—the first day of the week—was now the Sabbath. In other words, that Sunday after the resurrection was the “first of sabbaths” for Christians, switching the Sabbath day from Saturday to Sunday.

Ingenious!

Many of my former students will know that when I call something “ingenious” like this, it is a backhanded compliment. I’m really complimenting a person’s ability to take their intellect and use it to wiggle out of a clear interpretation of the text.

That was the challenge I faced at the end of my first year at Asbury. Would I approach the text with the goal of making it say what my tradition wanted it to say? Or would I go with the most likely conclusion? Would I “cook the books”? Or would I go with the evidence? That sounds easy until you get into some of the choices.

3. As I’ve mentioned, a key issue for me was the way the New Testament interpreted the Old Testament. It didn’t seem to follow the rules of inductive Bible study. The New Testament didn’t seem to interpret the Old Testament in context. The evidence seemed to say clearly to me, “The New Testament read the Old Testament in a spiritual, more-than-literal way.” At least that’s how I would later put it.

Isaiah 7:14 was not originally a prediction about a virgin birth 700 years later. In context, it was a sign to King Ahaz in the 700s BC about a child who would be born as a sign that Judah would survive the Assyrian threat. If it were only about the virgin birth, it wasn’t a very good sign to the very person to whom Isaiah was giving it. In that case, a sign for him would come 700 years after he was dead.

I found this dynamic repeatedly. Applying the rules of inductive method to the text often yielded straightforward results... that were different from the way the New Testament read the verses. This created a bit of a problem for me in my early days at Asbury.

4. Take Psalm 110:1: “Yahweh says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” This psalm was likely about the king of Judah. The psalmist was referring to Yahweh—the LORD in all caps—telling the king (the “lord”) that he would win in battle against his enemies. No problem.

My problem was that this is not the way the New Testament reads the psalm. Indeed, this verse might have been the central passage to help the earliest Christians interpret the resurrection. They took this verse to mean that God had enthroned Jesus as Lord after he rose from the dead (e.g., Acts 2:34-35). Indeed, in Mark 12:35-37, Jesus himself uses this verse to befuddle his debaters.

The twentieth century Paul Ricoeur had a concept that has since been helpful to me in interpretation. He spoke of a “first naïveté” when you don’t even realize that your interpretation isn’t reading in context. [1] Then you undergo some cognitive dissonance, and you realize your first interpretation was "incorrect." You gain some “critical distance” in your understanding. You move from a pre-modern to a modern understanding.

But then, he spoke of a “second naïveté,” when you realize that you can re-adopt your initial interpretation—not as what the text originally meant but as a more-than-literal reading. The text itself is not bound by its original meaning, so it is not wrong to read it differently. And you can do so with eyes wide open rather than without knowing you are doing it.

Another example is the way Acts 2:27 interprets Psalm 16. In Acts, Peter takes Psalm 16:10 in relation to Jesus staying in the grave. “You will not leave me in Sheol.” Read in its original context, the psalmist was likely saying that Yahweh would not let him die. God would not abandon him to the grave but would save him from his enemies.

But you could argue that Acts 2 was reading the verse in a “fuller sense,” a sensus plenior, as we mentioned in the previous chapter. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter hears the words in relation to Jesus—God would not leave Jesus in the realm of the dead after he died. Acts 2 takes the verse as a prophecy of resurrection.

5. Key in both of these interpretations is the assumption that David was the author of these psalms. The headings of the psalms call them psalms of David. But these headings were added when the psalms were collected—not when they were written. David didn’t title his own psalms, “A Psalm of David.” The editor of the psalms did. And if Psalm 137 is any indication, the final collection took place over 500 years after David.

For this reason, evangelicals have often not seen the headings of the psalms as necessarily inspired. There is a strong impulse of tradition to accept them, and perhaps most evangelicals do. But I was trained to think they could be viewed with an objective eye. [2]

Take Psalm 51. The tradition is that this is David repenting for his sins in relation to Bathsheba. It is a very strong preaching tradition and well known across the church. But, inductively, you get to verse 18—“Build the walls of Jerusalem.” Weren’t the walls of Jerusalem already built at the time of David? Yes, they were.

So, it raises the question. Might this verse actually fit the time after the Jews returned from Babylon when the walls of Jerusalem needed to be rebuilt? The psalm can indeed be read in this way. That is probably the consensus of most Old Testament scholars.

Of course, you will tick off a lot of people—including a lot of pastors—if you suggest such a thing. The traditional reading of the psalm is so strong, so often preached, that it is practically dogma. This is indeed a dynamic I have observed often. Our traditions about the Bible are usually far more important to us than the Bible itself. We get VERY upset when they are undermined by scholars, even if the text itself is compelling.

(I have often felt like a great “party pooper” as a teacher, so much so that I have often—more frequently than I would like to admit it—pulled my punches. As a “feeling” personality in Myers-Briggs, leaving my students feeling good about their faith was more important to me than giving them “the cold hard facts.” Contrast the "thinking" Bud Bence who often provoked faith crises in his teaching. :-) )

6. To be fair, there are plenty of places where the New Testament itself reasons under the assumption that David wrote most of the psalms. This was the tradition and assumption of the day. So we get into the question of the difference between the point of biblical statements and any cultural framework those points may come in. What is in the envelope of revelation, and what is actually being revealed?

This is scary stuff, and it was once very scary to me. I could see where these lines of thinking were going, and it was very unsettling. At one point my mother thought I was rebellious for seeming to always pick the opposite side than the one she lobbied for. But I did not experience myself that way. I experience myself as being drug "kicking and screaming" by the evidence and reason. 

I often turn to 2 Corinthians 12:2 as an example of revelation coming within the ancient assumptions of the biblical world. Paul talks about being taken up into the third sky or third heaven. We have examples of Jewish cosmology from the time (e.g., the Testament of Levi) that picture the heavens as layers of sky with God in the third sky—the highest heaven.

So, what is the "envelope" that revelation comes in here, and what is the revelation itself? The point of Paul’s comment is that he was taken into the very presence of God. I would argue that the picture of the universe here is the envelope. The way the heavens are structured is not Paul’s point. It is the way he expresses the point within his ancient worldview. 

We see the same thing in Philippians 2 when he speaks of every knee bowing before Christ—above the earth, on the earth, under the earth. Here is another ancient picture of the universe that is not the point. The point is that everything in the universe will acknowledge Jesus as Lord.

You are seeing the origins of my “incarnational” sense of hermeneutics. God meets us where we are and takes us from there. I concluded that this is how revelation worked with the authors of Scripture. God revealed truths to them from within their own ancient cultural frameworks, and he took them from there. This approach allowed me to let the text be the text while preserving Christian orthodoxy.

7. You can also see in my reflections here my attempt to process an inductive reading of the Bible over the years with the concerns of my evangelical community in mind. How can I affirm the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture and yet let the text speak for itself? 

To be frank, I have come to strongly dislike this question. What God thinks is what is true--not what a particular theological community insists must be true. I know that, at its best, the evangelical community is trying to guard the faith. But from a different point of view, it can be seen as resisting an honest search for truth, which is what God actually thinks. 

At the time, I didn’t find anyone to guide me through these questions. I’ve often wished I could go back in time to help myself at various points. There were those no doubt who could give me answers that didn’t ring true to the text. They tended to create more doubt in me than peace. There were probably those somewhat hidden voices who could have led me away from my faith community.

For me, the question was whether God wanted me to use my mind or not. Does God want me to be irrational as an act of obedience? Or is God a God of truth? Did God want me to exercise blind faith and reject what seemed to me to be the straightforward meanings of the text? Was it a test?

In the end, I decided that God was a God of truth. I decided that “all truth is God’s truth.” That doesn’t necessarily mean that all truths are obvious. Indeed, it is rational to decide, in a particular instance, to go against the evidence in one’s conclusion. The key, it seemed to me, was to be honest about it.

So many evangelical thinkers to me seemed to “cook the books.” They pretended to be following the evidence when in fact their (sometimes hidden) presuppositions were really steering the ship. They acted like the evidence demanded a verdict, but they were skewing the evidence in the direction they wanted it to go.

As I was heading into my second year at Asbury, I determined that I would let the most likely conclusion be my guiding star. Rather than use my intellect to see if it was possible to make the text say what my tradition wanted it to say, I would try to go with the most probable interpretations. I would become a scientist of the text and the truth, believing that God is truth and that the truth is what God believes—not what my tradition wants him to believe.

I have since come up with a twisted parable to illustrate the coherence between God and an evidentiary/logical approach to truth. Let’s say someone could sit down and prove to God that he did not exist. He is so aligned with the truth, he would say, “Fair enough,” and disappear.

Of course, this is a ridiculous thought experiment. But it is meant to show the complete alignment of God with rational and evidentiary truth. I know that is a controversial thought and some would no doubt argue that it places reason and evidence above God.

I disagree. The problem is not with God. It is with me. It is with me as a knower. God is not nervous about his own existence. The problem is my egocentric predicament, a concept I learned in Dr. Bross’ philosophy class at Central Wesleyan College. I am stuck inside my head. The world exists, but I see it “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV).

I suppose that decision set me on a path of some deconstruction. Traditions were now open to critique. Everything was open to critique. Over the years, I have certainly not been the smartest of scholars. But I would like to think that I am one of the most honest of scholars. And that has perhaps made me seem smarter than I actually am at times. Because--at least in my heart of hearts--I try to let the chips fall where they may.

[1] Especially in his work, The Symbolism of Evil (Yale University, 1967).

[2] We will get into this sticky wicket more in a later chapter. What do we do with the fact that the New Testament authors seem to assume traditional authorship of the Old Testament books?

Notes Along the Way: Asbury -- What is Inerrancy? 2

Continued from last week
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9. Using the inductive approach I learned at Asbury, over time, I have gone through all the Scriptures that the New Testament sees fulfilled in Christ. They are all read with spiritual eyes and varying degrees of engagement with context. 

If I do a more detailed version of these notes (on hermeneutics), I may go into more detail there. For the moment, let me give the most extreme example of these "more than literal" interpretations that I can think of.

In Matthew 2:23, Matthew tells us that Jesus' family went to live in Nazareth after they returned from Egypt. This is said to fulfill what was said by the prophets (plural) that the Messiah would be called a Nazarene. Again, as a young person, I expected to find a passage somewhere in the Old Testament that predicted that the Messiah would be from a village named Nazareth.

I'd be delighted if you could show me it. Indeed, since Matthew says the prophets, plural, I would be delighted if you could show me them. What's going on here?

The best answer I have heard is that Matthew has in mind two or three passages here that he is blending together. The central one is Isaiah 11:1 -- A branch will come from Jesse. The Hebrew word for "branch" is nezer. Is Isaiah 11:1 a prediction that the Messiah will grow up in a village called Nazareth? No, and the village almost certainly didn't even exist at the time of Isaiah.

It is a prediction that a descendant of David will arise and restore Israel as a whole people. Matthew may also have in mind passages from Judges that say Samson will be a Nazirite (e.g., Judg. 13:5). Jesus of course was not a Nazirite (Matt. 11:19).

This was quite troubling to me in my early twenties. Isaiah 11:1 had nothing to do with the village of Nazareth as far as anyone knows, and the words Nazirite and Nazarene have vastly different meanings.

10. This example reminds me of when my family was trying to decide if God wanted us to move to Florida. One of my sisters read Judges 1:15 in the King James, which says, "Thou hast given me a south land." She took the Spirit to be saying we should move south.

Is that what Judges meant originally? No. Can the Spirit speak to people however he wants? Yes. What human would dare tell the Spirit what he can or cannot do?

Matthew hears the Spirit speak in a similar "more than literal" way. He reads, "a branch will go forth." He hears "nezer" and thinks "Nazareth." Perhaps he thinks of the word Nazirite too, which also reminds him of Nazareth. The Spirit sparks a thought -- he hears Nazareth in these words. Jesus' childhood in Nazareth "fills up" those words with deeper meaning. It "fulfills" them.

Some scholars have called this method as reading the Old Testament in a "fuller sense," a sensus plenior in Latin. It has reminded some scholars also of an interpretive method used at Qumran called "pesher." Pesher is a "this is that" kind of interpretation. The words of the biblical text are decoded in the light of current events. In this case, "branch" equals Nazareth.

From a modern perspective, this seems like an error. That is both how critical scholars of the late 1800s took it, and it led evangelical scholars of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century to go to great lengths to grasp at contextual straws. For example, Ben Witherington hypothesized that maybe Nazareth was named after descendants of Judah who looked to the future fulfillment of Isaiah 11 -- not a shred of evidence for anything like this. It's a complete guess as far as I can tell. [1] 

(Ingenious, though)

11. There have been books and books and articles and articles on how the New Testament interprets the Old. There's a whole dictionary trying to explain away such problems from a modernist perspective. [2] These attempts to "cook the books" strongly turned me off. It seems to me that they just don't like what the text obviously says.

Using an inductive method -- letting the texts say what they say -- seemed to me to lead to obvious conclusions. Evangelical interpreters just didn't seem to like them. Once again, their idea of what the Bible can and cannot do seemed more important to them than letting the Bible indicate its own agenda.

It was -- and is -- perfectly fine for the Spirit to lead people to see things in the biblical texts that the original authors didn't intend. I'll let you argue with God about that. The danger, of course, is that people regularly see things in the text that is actually the burrito they had for breakfast rather than God. It's the abuse of the concept that is alarming. 

But you just can't wish away the legitimacy of spiritual exegesis in itself.

12. In the summer of 1988, still working out my hermeneutics, a friend and I went to see Dr. David Thompson, a Wesleyan professor at Asbury. We wanted to know how he processed issues like these in the light of the Wesleyan affirmation of inerrancy. I'm not sure what he said except that I don't think he was too keen on the use of the term in our cultural circles.

Indeed, I didn't know it at the time, but the then president of Asbury, David McKenna, had refused to let the heated debates of the time take place at Asbury. Its faith statement simply said that the Bible was inerrant in all that it affirmed. That gave interpreters the leeway to determine what it is that the Bible actually affirms rather than get embroiled in verse by verse warfare.

I asked my home pastor what he thought about Hosea 11:1, a rather smart man named Everett Putney. I have a feeling he too thought this was an unprofitable line of questioning. But he gave me an answer I have heard elsewhere -- the Wesleyan Discipline says that the Bible is inerrant in the original manuscripts, which of course we don't have. What if, he posed, the original manuscripts of Matthew said something different?

That definitely doesn't work. For one, we more or less know what the original manuscripts said, and there are no textual issues with Matthew 2:15. And, frankly, it is much more concerning to think the original text might be this uncertain than it is to think that Matthew interprets the Old Testament in a fuller sense. And of course, Matthew is consistent in this method. It doesn't just rest on this one instance.

13. In the end, there is no problem here. The problem is with the fundamentalists and modernists who insist the New Testament authors must read the Old Testament according to modern exegesis. If the Bible is supposed to be our model, then it must be acceptable to hear the Spirit speak beyond the original meaning. And that's that.

As a quick postscript, when I presented some of these thoughts as an early teacher at IWU, Steve Lennox I think was initially a little uncomfortable with them. He was, after all, a Houghton grad who did his doctoral dissertation on how "badly" holiness authors interpreted the Bible. He was the teacher of the Methods of Bible study class, which focused on reading in context.

His early advice to students in light of this issue was this: "Matthew was inspired. He can read the Old Testament out of context. You're not. Stick to the original meaning." I do think, however, that he softened a little on the question over the years. :-) 

After all, lectio divina is basically an open door to out-of-context readings of the text, inspired in the moment by the Holy Spirit.

To be continued...

[1] Ben Witheringon III, New Testament History.

[2] Beale, Carson, Gladd, and Naseli's Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old

The Third Dimension of Scripture

I have watched the more than one hour part of Mike Winger's second video on women in ministry that has to do with Genesis 2. I feel like to address it properly, I might need to do some prep work. So this is the first of two posts leading up to my response to his treatment of Genesis 2.

Much of evangelical (and of course fundamentalist) discussion of the Bible takes place in what I might call Flatland. It consists of two-dimensional discussions of the literary dimension of the text. Why? Because historical-cultural discussions are full of landmines. There is barbed wire and electric fences on certain issues. You're allowed to think freely and critically within the fence, but it can be risky to cross it.

Let me mention two flashpoints.

1. I grew up expecting God to speak to me and other Christians directly through the words of the biblical text. For example, you could read a verse that said, "They were all in one accord" and get the impression that God was telling you to buy a Honda Accord. It's not that we thought that was what the text meant to other Christians. It's just that God could speak directly to you through its words in magical ways.

In college and then seminary, I became more aware of what we might call the "original meaning" of biblical texts. I learned something called "inductive Bible study." You read a verse in the light of the verses that came before and after it. And you learned about historical context too -- the background of a biblical text in historical times and places.

I began to notice something. One thing I noticed is that the New Testament authors sometimes read Old Testament texts like I grew up reading them. For example, Hosea 11:1-2 is not a prediction of the future -- "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and I called my son out of Egypt. But the more I called them, the more they went away from me." It's talking about the exodus and the fact that Israel turned away from God.

Then imagine my surprise that Matthew heard in this verse an anticipation of Jesus going down to Egypt as a child and then coming out again. The verse had nothing to do with the Messiah originally. Matthew was reading the text in a way that went well beyond what the text was originally about -- and he does this regularly.

As I worked through the "prophecy-fulfillment" chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference King James Bible, I began to discover this dynamic repeatedly. The "fulfillments" of Old Testament words in the New Testament largely weren't from predictions. They were rather the NT authors reading the OT with spiritual eyes.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with this. I've seen a lot of energy spent in evangelical circles trying to figure out ingenious ways to say, "No, no, wait -- they actually were reading the OT in context." What I'm saying is that this is not the Bible's problem. It's a problem with our expectations. If we let the NT authors read the OT like Pentecostals and holiness folk have always read the Bible, there's no problem at all.

2. Let me give another example, Luke hears in Psalm 16:10 a prediction of Jesus' resurrection. "You will not abandon my life to Sheol; you will not give your faithful one to see the Pit." In context, the meaning of the psalm seems pretty obvious to me -- the psalmist is thanking God for not letting him die.

But Luke's Peter hears resurrection. David died. If the passage was about David, Peter argues, then it couldn't be true. Rather, David is anticipating Jesus' resurrection.

This really bothered me in seminary. The meaning of the psalmist seemed so obvious. He's not talking about final death. He's talking about not dying at that point of his life. I might easily pray such a prayer tonight. I know I'll die eventually. I'm asking God not to let me die tonight or next week... now, in other words.

This doesn't bother me anymore. What is inspired is the point a biblical author is making. The path to such points may involve cultural assumptions. I often use Paul's comment about being taken to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:2. His point isn't that there are three layers of heaven with God in the highest sky of the layer salad. That's just a cultural assumption. His point is that he was taken into the very presence of God.

3. What this means is that there may not be just one meaning to Genesis 1-3 in the Bible. There may be the original meaning of Genesis 1 and the original meaning of Genesis 2-3 and there may be the way Paul interprets Genesis 2 in 1 Corinthians and the way Paul interprets Genesis 2-3 in 1 Timothy. And all these meanings may not be the same, and yet they can all be inspired.

Texts are "polyvalent" -- susceptible to multiple potential meanings. Paul interprets Genesis 22:18 in both Galatians 3:16 and Romans 4:13, but he interprets it a little differently in each place. Daniel 11:31 interprets an abomination in relation to an event in 167BC, but Mark 13:14 take that same verse in relation to an event in AD70.

In short, the same words in Scripture can mean more than one inspired thing, and that's ok.

Therefore, in preparation for Winger's discussion of Genesis 2, 1 Timothy 2 can use Genesis 2-3 in an inspired way that, at the same time, is not what Genesis 2-3 originally meant. Or it can change the emphasis. And that's ok. The way a NT text uses an OT text only tells you for sure something about the NT text. It doesn't necessarily tell you as much about the OT text.

4. Here's the second flashpoint. As I went through seminary, I began to understand the reasoning behind some unpopular theories that went against tradition. For example, it is tradition that Moses wrote Genesis. 

But it's pretty hard to find a clear statement in the NT that Moses wrote Genesis. It's much easier to find connections between Moses and the rest of the Pentateuch but even here, it is often something Moses is saying in the Pentateuch that is referenced. I actually do think that the NT authors likely assumed Mosaic authorship. In my mind, this falls under the heading of cultural "assumptions that aren't the point."

Having learned inductive Bible study in seminary, it became clear 1) that Moses is never mentioned in Genesis and thus he is never said to be its author (it's anonymous) and 2) Moses is always referenced in the third person in the rest of the Pentateuch (Moses did this. Moses did that. Moses went up on a mountain and died.). From an inductive standpoint, we simply will not conclude that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.

5. Second, I used to laugh at the late 1800s source hypothesis JEDP. (And, by the way, it has been significantly critiqued and revised over the years.) But when I began to look at some of the reasons behind these sorts of source theories, many of them actually make some sense.

For example, there are several instances of a very similar story in the Pentateuch taking place, one of which uses Yahweh as the name of God and the other of which uses Elohim as his name. At one point, I made a chart of the Flood story. I put in one column verses with Yahweh and in another column verses with Elohim. You pretty much end up with two versions of the Flood story one of which has 7 of every clean animal and the other of which has 2 of every animal.

I don't know how it all worked. I don't have a good answer to all the whys. But it makes a lot of sense to me that Genesis 2-3 was part of an epic of Israel's story that is older than Genesis 1, which was perhaps an introduction added when the whole Pentateuch was finally collected as a whole.

Such theories bother a lot of people. For one thing, they can involve some speculation. It's educated speculation but still, scholars can get out of hand. 

The fact is, we just don't know a lot of things. Our lack of knowledge doesn't disprove that such things happened. The proper conclusion isn't, "Well then let's just say Moses wrote it." The proper conclusion is, "We don't know a lot of things for sure about how the biblical text came together."

6. The third dimension of Scripture, as I'm talking about it, is this highly complicated background of the text that is crucial in interpreting it for what it originally meant -- and that we often lack sufficient information about to know. 

God does just fine, and we do too. God makes the text come alive and speaks directly to us anyway. And of course, there is the church of the ages. God has arguably spoken to it as well and solidified some meanings.

This is quite involved. It is relevant to my engagement with Winger's discussion of Genesis 2 because I would say he reads the text in Flatland, and our discussions of the text often take place in Flatland. His arguments are often very grammatical and intratextual. But that's only part of the puzzle.

The discussion continues...

7.1 Learning Biblical Greek (Hermeneutical Autobiography)

It's pretty crazy to have five posts a week from five different writing projects with a different one almost every day of the week. So I thought I might do a two week cycle instead -- three days on one project, three days on the next, Sunday for Bible. Then complete the cycle the next week. That way the posts have more continuity rather than jerking readers in a different direction every day.

With that in mind, here is a continuation of yesterday's project, previously my Monday project -- a hermeneutical autobiography. Earlier posts at the bottom.
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1. I started off college as a chemistry major. I said I was going to be a doctor or a surgeon. I don't know if it was ever real to me. I don't think my mother necessarily thought it would happen. Probably a good thing. I probably would have left a scalpel in someone.

Near the end of my first semester at Central Wesleyan College, I felt like God was calling me into ministry. My mother wasn't surprised. My father advised I continue another semester as a chem major and then if I felt the same way, change my major then.

It's funny. I have doubted almost everything in my life at one point or another -- especially during the years from 1977-1987. But I didn't have any doubt that God wanted me to go to Central, and I never doubted that God was calling me into ministry. Strange things.

2. I dove into biblical Greek the fall of 1985. I would take enough Greek at Central to be a Greek Bible major alongside having general Bible and Religion majors as well. I enjoyed Greek. I had taken 2.5 years of Latin in high school, so it wasn't completely foreign to me. I knew about cases and changing endings on words. 

Knowing what I know now, I was not great at it, although I got As. Even with a Greek Bible major, I had to study my rear end off to pass the Greek competency entrance exam at Asbury. But I did pass it, and I guess not many did. David Thompson's study book was very helpful. I would only get really good at Greek when I became a Teaching Fellow and had to teach it. Along with philosophy, biblical languages have probably been my areas of greatest teaching giftedness.

I remember my brother-in-law having me try to read the Christmas story in Greek after my first semester. Of course, I couldn't. Not only is Luke some of the hardest Greek in the Bible, but you can't really do much with Greek after only one semester with it taught the traditional way. I would explore a different teaching approach later where you might have a better chance, but on vocabulary alone I was doomed in 1985.

I had Herb Dongell for my first year. He was very much the rote memorization type of teacher. He even had us learn all the accent rules. I remember trying to tutor a dyslexic ministry major on the accent rules the next year. We just busted out laughing at one point because of how silly some of the rules sound. "If the second to last syllable is long and the last syllable is short, if the second to last syllable is accented, it will take a circumflex."

3. If you asked me why a pastor should learn the biblical languages, there is of course the matter of always having to rely on someone else's word for it if you don't know them. There is frankly a lot of shlock out there coming from pulpits in the name of Greek and Hebrew. There's a lot of crazy stuff out there. Biblical languages are treated like magic tricks.

Most American pastors don't have the aptitude to learn them. This is why I never advocated that they be required in my circles. It ends up being a waste of time. Keith Drury and Russ Gunsalus had data ready to talk me out of requiring it at Wesley Seminary but I never had a thought of requiring it. When you forget 95% of what you didn't learn the week after finals, it's a bad use of time.

I pioneered Greek for Ministry and Hebrew for Ministry courses at Wesley Seminary. The goal was to teach use of the tools and the categories-meaning of the languages rather than expecting full memorization. I think there is much more hope for teaching the significance of Greek and Hebrew than having people memorize everything. In the years since, I have hammered YouTube with Greek and Hebrew videos. I even have a couple Hebrew courses on Udemy. 

But most American pastors simply won't be able to do it -- or more likely, will learn just enough to get it wrong. When I became a teaching fellow in biblical languages at Asbury in 1990, my predecessor had a sign on his desk that said, "Just remember. People are stupid." I thought that was awful. By the way, I am stupid in so many ways. But, 35 years later, I get what he was saying about seminary students and Greek. Most people just can't do it on any level of proficiency, not in the amount of time we give to it.

This is a parable, I suspect, for truly understanding the Bible in depth. (Keith Drury would kill me for saying this -- at least he would have at one point.) Most simply aren't going to. The purist says, "But they should, especially pastors!" The realist and pragmatist says, "Everyone has a different giftedness. Some people can climb mountains. Other people enjoy looking at them."

If I could go back to theological education 60 years ago and change the way Greek and Hebrew were taught, I've wondered if they might still be required. I would teach the significance of the categories of the language, much like a book I wrote last year. The free tools available make it so much easier now to learn the important things -- even more than when I wrote those Greek and Hebrew for ministry courses ten years ago.

4. The greatest value I experienced from these languages is the way they helped me enter the biblical worlds on a whole new level. When you are reading the Bible in English, it's like you are watching the biblical world on TV. You're not really there. It's really hard to get out of your culture and assumptions and get into the biblical worlds. The languages are a baptism by fire into their worlds.

Most Christians will never really enter that world on a deep level, including most pastors. It's like the person that eats at McDonalds when they're traveling Europe. They're joking about you in French behind your back, but you're oblivious because you don't speak the language. The taxi driver is charging you three times as much as normal but you don't know it.

Learning the biblical languages was the first step in beginning to read the Bible on its own terms rather than my terms. This was especially the case with Hebrew, which I didn't really start learning in depth until seminary...

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1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

5. An Easter Morning in Galatians

6.1 Adventures in the King James Version
6.2 Beyond the King James Version

6.2 Beyond the King James Version

Mondays I am writing about my journey with Scripture in college, seminary, and beyond. Earlier posts are at the bottom. The previous post started chapter 5, "Adventures with the King James Version."
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5. I did not change my mind about the King James version over night. I wrestled with the question for about a year and a half after that college paper before I finally accepted the scholarly consensus.

For one thing, I wasn't sure who to believe about the manuscripts. In the 1978 version of the NIV, there was a note in a couple places that went like this: "The earliest and most reliable manuscripts do not have verses..." It was a bold claim. It said that the further back in history you go, the less you find these verses in the handwritten copies of the New Testament.

More recent editions of the NIV have softened the tone a little. So with regard to John we now find this note: "The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53—8:11." This is the story of the woman caught in adultery. It does not appear in the oldest Greek manuscripts of John.

Whaat???

6. You can see how unsettling notes like these were at first. You'd grown up with the King James Version. You'd heard this story of the woman caught in adultery your whole life. As a pastor, maybe you'd preached from this story your whole ministry. And now some new Bible implies it doesn't belong in the Bible.

I heard a sermon on the woman caught in adultery this past year. And I still from time to time hear people quote the Great Commission from Mark 16:15 (as opposed to Matthew 28's version). I don't usually point out to them that the verse probably wasn't part of Mark originally. But there's the note in the NIV2011 of Mark 16: "The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20."

I get it. It looks sinister. "They're cutting verses out of the Bible," people said and then invoked the condemnations of Revelation 22:18-19 about removing things from the book. [1] A book came out in 1993 called New Age Bible Versions that was extremely convincing if you didn't know anything about the subject. [2] By the time it came out, I was starting my doctorate and knew a fair amount of the debate so I found it pretty funny. 

For example, it tries to malign a famous Bible scholar from the late 1800s because he wrote in his journal that he liked to have evening strolls talking about "metaphysics." The author didn't know what metaphysics is in philosophy, which is clearly what this scholar meant. But she assumed he was talking about spirit guides and the kinds of spiritualist trends that were taking place in the 90s. 

I had a really good laugh about that one. But on a much more serious note, she suggested some translators of the NIV got Alzheimer's as God's judgment on them. This book had immense impact among those who didn't really understand the subject.

7. What you should realize is that scholars are not trying to take verses out. They have concluded that verses like the longer ending of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery were added in during the first few centuries of Christianity. It is natural for us to think of the King James Version (KJV) as old and the NIV as relatively young (not so much any more). But when we are talking about the handwritten copies they are translated from, the NIV Greek manuscripts are older than the KJV ones -- generally much older.

The 1611 King James Version was good scholarship for its day. But we now have manuscripts that are 1000 years older than the ones they used. This is just another example of tradition resisting change. You grow up with a faith that involves a mixture of gold and hay, but it's hard to realize which is which. You feel like someone is attacking your faith when they are only refining it. It's perfectly understandable.

The tradition of the Greek behind the KJV was so strong that it prevailed long after scholars realized that it wasn't likely as original as the older manuscripts that were being discovered in the 1800s. It was two individuals in particular -- B. F. Westcott and Fenton Hort -- who finally managed to dislodge the Greek "textus receptus" behind the KJV in Greek editions of the New Testament.

They did focus their argument on two key manuscripts that dated from the early 300s. One was found in the Vatican, called Codex Vaticanus. The other was found at a monastery on the Sinai peninsula -- Codex Sinaiticus. Mind you, even earlier Greek manuscripts have been discovered since then, and they largely support the readings of these two.

I grew up with these two men being demonized -- Westcott and Hort. Books like the New Age Versions of the Bible seemed to think that they could undermine the newer versions of the Bible if they could malign Westcott and Hort (and apparently the translators of the NIV). This is called the ad hominem fallacy -- where you attack the people rather than making an actual argument.

But Westcott and Hort only systematized what most experts of the biblical text already thought at the time. And, as I mentioned, even earlier manuscripts have since been found.

8. I should note, there were some very educated hold outs in favor of the traditional Greek text, the "textus receptus" or "received text." In the late 1800s, John Burgon argued that the manuscripts Westcott and Hort most relied on were corrupted manuscripts. F. H.A. Scrivener argued similarly. In the mid-1900s, E. F. Hills wrote a book called The King James Defended that I already mentioned.

In this present time, there are Majority Text scholars who are quite knowledgeable of the manuscripts and who have some very clever arguments against the majority. Indeed, in this reactionary moment in history with so much information at our fingertips, I sense a possible resurgence of cleverly argued "Greek behind the King James" support. We are living in an upside down time, a decade of unreason and irrationality.

9. Let me return to my own pilgrimage. After I became committed to the truth rather than tradition, I still didn't know what to make of the manuscript situation. After all, Burgon could have been right that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were bad manuscripts. "Maybe that's why they have survived," it occurred to me. "Because no one used them."

Interestingly, modern manuscript studies that are based on computer analysis have seemed to undermine to some extent the families and grouping of manuscripts that I studied in college and seminary. [3] When I took a course in textual criticism with Bob Lyon at Asbury, we heard about the Alexandrian, Western, and Byzantine manuscript traditions. 

In my mind, I reduced them to 1) manuscripts that were like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, 2) manuscripts that were like Codex Bezae, including many Latin manuscripts, and 3) all the medieval manuscripts that pretty much read the same way. The first group, I would later concede, had readings that were most likely original.

But to be frank, I didn't put as much stock in it as many did. It seemed to me like some wanted to systematize things a little too much. It was more of a trendline than anything you could absolutely depend on.

Majority Text scholars like James Snapp argue extensively from quotations by the church fathers and from early translations of the New Testament into other languages. This is very clever. It is to say, "There may not be early Greek manuscripts that support the traditional reading, but here's an early quote of it from so and so, and here is an early Syriac manuscript with it." Of course, you have to do textual criticism on the manuscripts of the church fathers too. [4]

10. So, the manuscripts -- or external evidence -- did not convince me. The arguments were far too complicated, far too minute. I have found over the years that minutia is often a tool to try to undermine the most likely. "The evidence looks like it supports x, but let me bombard you with a web of intricate details that show it's really y." 

Much of what is going around in political circles these days falls into this category. The result is that you feel really smart with secret knowledge when really it's just a smokescreen to wiggle out of the most likely conclusions. And you can smirk at your "uninformed friends" who think x seems right.

It was not the external evidence, which was very strong, but what is called the "internal evidence" that ultimately convinced me to change my mind.

Internal evidence is based on common sense. The most likely original reading is the one that would explain where the other readings came from. For example, take 1 John 2:23: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either, but the one who acknowledges the Son has the Father as well." Some copies of 1 John only have the first part: "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either."

Was there some evil copyist who deliberately chopped this verse off? Not likely. The easiest explanation is an "eye skip." Two lines in the manuscript ended with "the Father." You copy the first line, looking from the original to the new copy. When you look back, your eye goes to the second line instead of the first (because they both end in "the Father"). Without realizing it, you have left a whole line of text out.

If you understand the scenario, this makes perfect sense. In fact, if you have ever copied something, you may have done this yourself. Most of the variations among the manuscripts are simple mistakes like this one. There was no evil fiend involved -- unlikely for someone whose job is to copy the Bible. 

Here's another one. In later Greek, the letter upsilon and the letter epsilon were both pronounced the same. That means that the Greek for "our" and the Greek for "your" sounded exactly the same. So, it is no surprise that the original text of 1 John 1:4 is uncertain. Some manuscripts say "our joy" and others say "your joy." Clearly, some copyist misheard what word was being said because the two words sound the same.

11. It was thus common sense that won out in the end for me. Why would anyone remove the story of the woman caught in adultery? It is a magnificent story that most find to resonate deeply with the character of Jesus. It might even be based on a story that actually happened. It makes much more sense that it was added in as an oral tradition about Jesus in search of a home -- rather than a story someone took out very early in church history.

Westcott and Hort suggested two rules that are not absolutes but more like trends. "Choose the more difficult reading" as more likely to be original (the lectio difficilior). Why? Because copyists were more likely to try to "fix" the unclear than to mess up the clear. "Choose the shorter text" because material was more likely to be added for clarity than to be cut out (the lectio brevior). Again, the second one is less powerful than the first, but it does seem to work much of the time.

Take Mark 16:9-20. Verse 9 starts the chapter all over again in a different style. We had already heard about the women at the tomb. Mark 16:9 acts like the first 8 verses weren't even there, like the copyist stepped out to use the restroom while the first eight verses were being read. 

We can have intricate arguments about the manuscript evidence (although not the Greek ones -- you have to bring in the fathers and the versions because the Greek tradition for this ending being early is very weak). But these verses don't read like they belong there. They summarize the resurrection appearances of the other Gospels. They don't continue the train of thought from 16:1-8.

Apparently, someone tacked an existing summary of resurrection appearances from elsewhere onto Mark 16:8. Why? Because otherwise the chapter ends saying, "The women told no one because they were afraid." It's a weird way to end the Gospel. You can see that someone would want to cap that tooth. In fact, there is another shorter ending as well among the manuscripts.

So choose the reading as original that would best explain how the other readings came about. Choose the more difficult reading. Well, the more difficult reading is for it to have ended at 16:8 with the women telling no one. It's obvious why the other readings would have arisen. 16:8 is just a strange way to end the story. It seems incomplete.

So amid all the intelligent sounding, clever arguments to the contrary, informed common sense time and time again comes out in support of the scholarly consensus and the text used in modern versions. There is no conspiracy here. In fact, it makes perfect sense that the church smoothed out the Greek text as the Bible was increasingly read as part of the liturgy of worship. In the 300s, as Christianity becomes legal and the church begins to standardize doctrine and canon, the text of the Bible becomes standardized as well.

12. Near the end of my textual criticism class at Asbury, Dr. Lyon asked me if I was a "closet textus receptus man." I was still a little unsure, but I fell off the log on his side in the moment. He was of course well-known in scholarly circles for his work with Codex Ephremi Rescriptus. Over time, my confidence in the scholarly consensus would only increase. Again, not because of the manuscripts but because of common sense.

Let me reveal the effect this pilgrimage had on me. I feel like I am particularly gifted at seeing the big picture and seeing connections and patterns. I have seen this pattern over and over again. There is a tradition. It is something a group has its identity strongly wrapped around. Then someone comes along with new evidence or a new perspective that seems to go against the tradition. That person perhaps has studied the subject more thoroughly. Perhaps they are somewhat of an expert on it.

Conservatism is, in its root meaning, a resistance to change, often in the name of preserving truth. But in my opinion, it is also often resistance to new insight. It is often the elephant that Jonathan Haidt writes about in The Righteous Mind. [5] The elephant is going to go where it wants to go. And when the stability of your world is based on the status quo, you're going to want to stick with the status quo. This is why the young are typically more open to new ideas than the old -- they have less invested in tradition and the status quo.

So, some very intelligent traditionalists -- perhaps I might even call them sentimentalists -- go to town trying to explain away the new data or the new evidence. It is an identity-preserving dynamic. It is exactly what Thomas Kuhn has said that "normal science" does in the face of new scientific theories. [6] It is entirely predictable and often ingenious.

I would see this pattern so often as I continued my education that I could smell it a mile away. Instead of pursuing the evidence to its most likely conclusion, one's intelligence is applied to try to argue for the traditional position. In Jonathan Haidt's imagery, the elephant rider comes up with smart-sounding reasons for why the elephant is going in the right direction.

I've called it "cooking the books." It's making arguments that might even seem silly to someone with an open mind. When you're in an echo chamber in a bubble, people are not looking necessarily for good arguments. You just need any argument that will give you an excuse to continue thinking what you already think. I would see this pattern over and over in seminary and in the years beyond.

13. There really aren't a lot of huge textual issues like the ending of Mark or the woman caught in adultery in John. No one need worry about losing their faith over this question of the text. Indeed, one of my takeaways from this journey is that God must be focused on the message of the Bible, not the minute details of the text. 

Of course this goes against some of the teaching you hear about how meticulous the copyists of the Hebrew Bible were. I hate that sort of stuff because it sets people up for a faith crisis later -- when there was no need for it. The meticulous copyists were the Masoretes in the Middle Ages. From what I can tell, some earlier copyists were more like The Message in temperament. The "Western" text of Acts is way longer and for no ideological reason. Someone just added a mess of details.

I want to end with 1 John 5:7. The KJV of this verse is the most Trinitarian verse in the Bible. The problem is that there isn't a Greek manuscript before the 1400s that has it. It is never mentioned as far as we know in any of the Trinitarian debates of the 300s -- rather odd if it had existed at the time. Even the man behind the Greek text of the KJV -- Erasmus -- didn't think it was original.

There's nothing wrong with the content of the verse. It's good theology. It just wasn't at all likely in the original version of 1 John. That's what the evidence and common sense say. 

Modern versions aren't part of some conspiracy to get rid of the Trinity. It's just that sometimes the facts don't say what we want them to say. 

[1] Of course, that verse was about removing teaching from the scroll of Revelation. The Bible wasn't packaged together when those verses were written. The scroll of Revelation traveled on its own then. And it is about the message of Revelation, not individual words. 

This is another example of what I have called a pre-modern or unreflective reading of the Bible. Our understandable default is to read the Bible as it appears to us, not as it actually is.

[2] G. A. Riplinger, New Age Bible Versions: An Exhaustive Documentation of the Message, Men & Manuscripts Moving Mankind to the Antichrist's One World Religion (A. V.. 1993).

[3] For example, by scholars using the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method or CBGM. My good friend Matt Whidden is deeply involved in such studies.

[4] I have worked a little with the Passion Translation of the Gospels. Its paraphraser, Brian Simmons, seems to consider the Syriac version of the Gospels almost a direct line to Jesus himself. By calling it the Aramaic text, he essentially claims to get behind the Greek to Jesus himself. It also allows him to consider original many of the traditional verses absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts. But ultimately, he is just finding a way to give priority to later Syriac manuscripts.

[5] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).

[6] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).

_________________________

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

5. An Easter Morning in Galatians

6.1 Adventures in the King James Version

1.3 Approaches to Scripture

Tuesday Science and Scripture continues. We are in the second half of the first draft of chapter 1: "Four Relationships" 

Previous posts:

1.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
1.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

The Nature of Scripture 
Since we are asking about the relationship between science and Scripture, we should take at least a moment to clarify exactly what Scripture and science exactly are. It is perhaps ironic that, of the two, we might be less refective on the nature of Scripture than we are the nature of science. There are three main approaches to Scripture in this discussion, all of which likely intermingle in actual practice.

The first is exactly what we implied in the previous paragraph. Many readers approach Scripture in an unreflective, "what you see is what you get" manner, assuming the text means what it seems to say to them in modern English. One reads the words and defines them according to whatever meanings are in your head. If you are reading the Bible in English, then you assume that the normal meanings of English words in your world are the meanings the words have. 

For example, if you were reading the King James Version (KJV) of 1 Peter 1:15, you would encounter the words, "be ye holy in all manner of conversation." If you come to these words from the standpoint of modern English, you will likely think the verse is about how you talk to others. Yet the meaning of the English word conversation has changed over the last few hundred years. Accordingly, the English Standard Version (ESV) has "you also be holy in all your conduct."

Of course, the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (and some Aramaic), while the New Testament was written in Greek. Understanding the original meanings of the Bible's words two thousand years ago and more is not simply a matter of finding an English word that is equivalent to those Greek and Hebrew words. This is because the meanings of words are never exactly equivalent from one language to another. There is always some loss of meaning.

This is because the meaning of words is in how they are used. A dictionary does not tell us some unchanging meaning to words. A dictionary is a popularity contest. The meanings of words are numbered from most common use of a word to the least common. Meanings come and go. New meanings are always being added as they arise in culture, and older meanings (like that of conversation in the KJV as "conduct") first become archaic and then are dropped entirely.

For this reason, the meaning that first comes to our mind when we read the Bible may approximate the meaning the verse had when it was written, but it might not. Our first impression may actually turn out to be quite far from what the verse really meant. An English dictionary is only helpful if we do not know what the English words in our Bible mean, which we probably do.

Further, these meanings are embedded in a cultural world. When I read the word husband or wife in the Bible, I am not reading about a modern husband or wife. I am not reading about families as they likely exist in my world. I am reading about husbands, wives, and families as they existed in the biblical worlds.

Additionally, many Christians tend to read the Bible in an atomistic way. That is to say, we may tend to focus on individual verses rather than reading the Bible the way we would normally read a book, following paragraph to paragraph. If we remove verses from their paragraphs and chapters, we are even less likely to be reading the words "in context." To read in context is to read the words in the flow of an overall book of the Bible as well as in the light of its historical background.

All that is to say, we may assume that science is what needs to be adjusted in relation to Scripture when our understanding of Scripture itself may be incorrect. For example, Martin Luther once mocked the new idea that the earth might go around the sun, quoting Joshua 10 where the sun stands still. [21] Taking Joshua 10:13 literally, Luther assumed that the verse was saying it was the sun that was going around the earth and that it stopped in its course. In the 1500s and 1600s, there were many Christians who saw any language in the Bible about the sun rising or setting as evidence that it was in fact the sun that goes around the earth (e.g., Eccl. 1:5).

Today, we would take this language phenomenologically. That is to say, we take this as informal language that speaks of the world in terms of how it appears, not as scientific statements that should be taken literally. For example, Paul may be alluding to the dead when he says that every knee "under the earth" will bow to Christ (Phil. 2:10), but few Christians today think of the center of the earth as the true abode of the dead, even if we might bury their bodies under the earth. Similarly, when Paul talks about being taken up into "the third sky" (2 Cor. 12:2), few of us think that he is revealing that God's throne is in the upper atmosphere.

What is interesting is that we are usually willing to adjust our hermeneutic -- our way of interpreting Scripture -- in these instances even though Paul and the authors of Joshua and Ecclesiastes themselves may have taken this imagery literally. We are willing to say, "The point of the revelation was not the literal structure of the universe but the event being described or the actual point being made." Determinations of whether we should read such imagery literally or figuratively are often made unreflectively, depending on what our Christian traditions find important or generally ignore.

However, in other cases, we may actually be mistaken about what the text really meant. Our interpretation may be wrong. We may be reading the words as they strike us in our world rather than in the way the words were intended to be understood in their worlds.

In addition to an unreflective reading of Scripture, there are two other approaches that are significantly more reflective. We might call one a presuppositional approach and the other an inductive approach. The first says, "We cannot rightly understand Scripture unless we have a number of key faith assumptions in place." The other says that "We should let the text tell us what it meant by reading the words in their most likely original literary and historical contexts."

What is an inductive approach? An inductive approach simply tries to read the words for what they would have most likely meant when they were first written. This is a potentially complicated task. Indeed, we often lack sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on the original meaning beyond a reasonable doubt. In many cases, the meaning of the Bible is "under-determined." [22]

Nevertheless, an inductive approach draws on evidence from context to identify the most likely original meanings of a passage. This includes the literary context of a passage -- the words that come before and after the text in question. What does the train of thought lead us to think the words most likely meant. It also draws on the historical context of a passage -- its likely historical and situational background. This latter context is much more difficult to identify with certainty.

As relates to science, one of the most important questions is that of genre. The genre of a document is the type of literature it is. For example, we know not to laugh (generally) at an obituary or to cry after reading a comic strip meant to be funny. We absorb these expectations from our culture without even realizing it. 

Yet the expectations of biblical genres were part of the biblical worlds. I will not naturally come to the biblical texts with those assumptions because they were shaped in a world that is ancient and likely quite foreign to mine. What, for example, were the expectations of history writing when the biblical texts were written? What were the expectations of story telling or poetry or prophecy? 

For some, this may seem to be an attempt to dodge the "plain meaning" of the text. Yet, again, the plain meaning of the text to me is a meaning based on my world, not the text's world. Is my world really more important than theirs in determining the meaning? Do not the biblical texts themselves say that they were written to ancient Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, and so forth?

There is, however, another approach to the meaning of the biblical text that we might call presuppositional. To be clear, there are presuppositions -- pre-assumptions -- involved in the first two approaches mentioned above. The unreflective interpreter has largely unexamined assumptions. The inductive interpreter assumes that we have enough evidence to make reasonable decisions about the meaning of the text that at least approach or aim at objectivity.

What distinguishes a presuppositionalist approach is the nature and extent of the assumptions made. First, such assumptions are largely theological in nature -- they have to do with the nature of Scripture, the nature of human knowledge, and how God reveals himself. For example, we mentioned above that the meaning of Scripture is often under-determined. Many "post-liberal" theologians thus argue that it is not only permissible but inevitable that we bring our theological assumptions into our interpretations. [23]

Another group of interpreters that have long emphasized the role of presuppositions in interpretation are those who come from the standpoint of a "Reformed epistemology." The Reformed tradition stands in the stream of John Calvin's thought (1509-64), who famously emphasized that God chooses or "elects" certain individuals to be saved while not choosing others. The basis of God's choice is his decision alone and has nothing to do with any choices on the part of the elect.

It is thus natural that some in this tradition would see a proper understanding of Scripture as something that is given by God rather than investigated. You might say that the most important truths are more revealed than discovered. Karl Barth (1886-1968), perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the twentieth century, wrote a masterpiece of theology known as the Church Dogmatics. [24] In them, he takes the posture that the most important truths about God are not to be argued for on the basis of evidence but to be believed as a matter of dogma.

Two more recent, leading Reformed figures in this regard are Alvin Plantinga and Vern Poythress. [25] Both would strongly emphasize that science is neither objective nor presuppositionless. We have already seen that this is the case from the work of Thomas Kuhn. 

A second key point that both Plantinga and Poythress make is that science often proceeds from a naturalist or anti-supernaturalist presupposition. What this means is that the possibility of God designing or being involved with the creation or processes of nature is either precluded or bracketed out. Naturalism presupposes that divine intervention cannot be used as an explanation for any scientific data. [26]

On the one hand, it is understandable that science would normally bracket the question of divine or "supernatural" intervention. When you are looking for an explanation for why mold grows on cheese, demons are not a particularly helpful explanation, as we will discuss in the next chapter. Nevertheless, what if God actually does exist and intervene in nature? What if the true explanation for the fossil evidence is that God actively participated in the development of simpler to more complex forms of life, as old earth creationists believe? In that case, the assumptions of normal science would actively preclude arriving at the correct explanation.

Christians are theists. That is to say, historic Christianity both believes that God is objectively real and that God is involved in the creation. A number of prominent scientists from the 1600s and 1700s were deists. They believed that God had created the world as a self-operating machine but that he was no longer involved in the operations of the world. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) would be a good example of someone whose views approached those of a deist. []

However, deism is not an option for a historic Christian, not least because the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the central features of Christian faith. It would be hard to underestimate the degree to which the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are an "intrusion" into the natural cause-effect flow of nature! For this reason, historic Christians by definition believe that God remains involved in the world.

The degree to which presuppositions about Scripture should be involved in scientific thinking can vary from one presuppositionalist to another. For example, Ken Ham is perhaps the best known spokesman at this time for what is called "young earth creationism." [27] He would interpret Genesis 1 to present creation in six literal 24 hour days.

For him, presuppositionalism not only assumes this interpretation of Genesis 1 but it demands that all scientific evidence must be analyzed with this assumption in view. If you attend a creation-evolution debate in which Ham represents the creationist side, you will hear much about presuppositions in his presentation. In his case, the evidence is not allowed to come to any conclusion but one that coheres with his interpretations of the relevant biblical passages.

On the other end of the spectrum, Francis Collins might represent a theist who looks for minimal involvement of God in the course of nature. Collins is well-known both for his leadership of the Human Genome Project and his strong Christian faith. In the late 1900s, the Human Genome Project mapped human DNA for the first time. Yet Collins is also known for his conversion to Christian faith, a pilgrimage captured well in his classic, The Language of God. [28]

Yet in his acceptance of evolution he largely rejects the option that God might have directed such a process. [29] Although he is a theist, he suggests that resort to the miraculous should be a course of last resort. Any "God of the gaps" approach -- which uses divine intervention to explain current gaps in our scientific knowledge -- should be strongly avoided. [] We will see in the next chapter why this approach is understandable. Nevertheless, it is possible that Collins' assumptions could lead him to miss God's divine hand when it was actually there in a pronounced way. 

[insert discussion of inerrancy]

We will keep these three basic approaches to Scripture in mind in the discussions of this book. Ideally, we would move from unreflectivity about our approach either to a primarily inductive or presuppositionalist approach. However, we likely will adopt some mixed approach, with at least some presuppositions and some evidentiary elements. We should keep these options in mind as we move forward.

[21] In Martin Luther's Table Talk as recorded by Mathesius (1539)

[22] See below for Stephen Fowl as an example of someone who would say that the meaning of the Bible is so underdetermined that it is fully acceptable to read it with theological presuppositions in place, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Blackwell, 1998).

[23] I would describe the post-liberal tradition as thinkers who have come from mainstream (liberal) Christian traditions who have rejected what we might call a modernist, evidentiary oriented approach to the most important truths. Rather, these thinkers emphasize the legitimacy of giving primacy to certain faith assumptions apart from evidentiary reasoning. 

The work of Hans Georg Gadamer often stands in the background of such thinkers. See Truth and Method (Mohr Siebeck, 1960). Gadamer argued that our readings of texts are an inevitable fusion of our "horizon" with the horizon of the text. We thus cannot see the historical meaning of the text-in-itself but only the fusion of our world with the world of the text.

[24] The series was published in English by T & T Clark in 13 parts and 4 volumes from 1936-77.

[25] E.g., Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University, 2011); Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2006). See also Ransom Poythress, Has Science Made God Unnecessary? (Christian Focus, 2022).  

[26] The roots of such bracketing go back to the Enlightenment, not least David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

[27] See especially answersingenesis.com. 

[28] Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2006).

[29] Collins, Language, 45-52