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
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