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...