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?
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