1.2 Spirit-fillings in Acts (part 2)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
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8. Of course, this is not exactly the way I grew up hearing entire sanctification preached from Acts. In fact, the holiness tradition did not use Acts 4:31 as an example of entire sanctification. Entire sanctification was understood as a single, "definite" event, not a repeatable one. It was a filling with a very distinct purpose, not one of broad, potentially varied empowerment. So I strongly rejected Acts 4:31 as a sanctification text at one point.

In the last part of this chapter, I want to look at the verses in Acts that I grew up associating with entire sanctification. I want to show why virtually no New Testament expert -- including Wesleyan scholars -- reads them that way today. I also want to show how we might miss some fundamental aspects of New Testament theology if we read these passages in Acts in terms of entire sanctification.

9. When I was a teenager, I read through the entire Bible in the King James Version (KJV) and highlighted in orange every verse that mentioned holiness or sanctification. But, when I went to seminary, I learned what is called "inductive Bible study" or "IBS." In IBS, you learn to read a verse in light of the verses that come before and after it in the flow of thought. This would complicate things for me.

I grew up with the KJV, which numbers and lists each verse separately as if each verse is a self-standing proposition in its own right. While this way of presenting verses is very conducive to memorizing Scripture, it tends to work against reading the verses in context. The staccato of verse, verse, verse tends to interrupt the flow of thought.

Another feature of inductive Bible study is of course reading the words in the light of what the original Greek and Hebrew words of the Bible meant at the time the books were written. This can be difficult because there were no dictionaries back then. The scholars of the last couple of centuries have invested an immense amount of time trying to learn the texts and archaeology of the ancient world to know this background.

If you think of it, the author of 1 Samuel used Hebrew words that he (presumably) and ancient Israel used at that time. Contrast me reading through the KJV. How did I define the words? Obviously, I defined the words using the dictionary in my head. Where did I get this dictionary? I got it both from growing up speaking American English and, perhaps more significantly in this case, from the holiness preaching of my childhood.

Given my "dictionary," whenever I saw the words holiness or sanctification, what I heard was "a second, definite work of grace whereby the heart is cleansed from inbred sin." But of course, the Bible never defines holiness or sanctification in this way. It is a theological definition from my tradition. It is nothing actually said explicitly or systematically in the biblical texts.

This is a somewhat startling realization even if it is obvious once pointed out. Does Acts 2 say that the disciples were sanctified, let alone entirely sanctified? No. Does Acts 8 or Acts 10 say that the Samaritans or Gentiles were sanctified when they received the Holy Spirit? No. The verb sanctify appears twice in Acts (20:32; 26:18). [3] The word holiness never appears. "Entire sanctification" never appears.

So where would we get the idea that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were experiences of entire sanctification? We would get the idea from the glasses we bring to the text. It's not mentioned in the text itself. It rather comes from the dictionary in our heads that we have grown up with.

10. As I began to read the Bible in context. I would read one of those verses I had highlighted in orange and would conclude that it wasn't exactly talking about what I had thought it was. "Oh," I would say to myself, "that particular verse isn't really talking about entire sanctification." I had brought a beautiful theological system to the text, but the text itself often wasn't really saying quite the same thing.

Important to say, I wouldn't be writing this book if I didn't believe it was possible to reconstruct an understanding of entire sanctification. I believe it is, and I have already begun to sketch out that reconstruction in the first part of this chapter. However, in this last part, I am showing how the way I grew up hearing the doctrine was exegetically problematic. This is one of the reasons why the doctrine is so seldom preached today.

Initially, I read the biblical text on this subject in a pre-reflective way. That is to say, I was not aware of my own "dictionary" and assumptions when coming to the biblical text. I was wearing glasses without realizing it. I did not realize that the text could be read differently, nor did I have any concept of the distance between the way I read the text and the way the original audiences would have heard it.

In the context of Acts, the Spirit-fillings are almost always initial experiences -- except for 4:31. The Day of Pentecost is the first coming of the Spirit in the story world of Luke-Acts. As you probably know, Acts is volume 2 of a two-part series. The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise that John the Baptist makes in Luke 3:16. It is the inauguration of the age of the Spirit. [4]

In the world of Luke-Acts, the disciples could not have received the Spirit prior to Pentecost. Pentecost is the birth of the church, the first fruits. It is the beginning.

Similarly, Cornelius and the Gentiles are just believing in Jesus for the first time in Acts 10. The previous followers of John the Baptist are just believing in Jesus for the first time in Acts 19. In both cases, they receive the Holy Spirit at the time that they are baptized. The same goes for Paul in Acts 9. In short, these are all initial experiences. They were not Christians before because they were just now believing in Jesus. They were "pre-Christians" in some ways before but not believers in Christ.

The incident at Samaria in Acts 8 is very exceptional in this regard. Given the lenses of the holiness movement, the story at Samaria would be the norm. You get baptized and then, sometime later, you are sanctified. But Acts 8 is a strange event in Acts. They have been baptized and the Holy Spirit should have come. Why hasn't the Holy Spirit come? 

Something is wrong. Call Peter and John because they should have received the Holy Spirit when they were baptized. They lay hands on them. They receive the Holy Spirit. Whew! Now everything is the way it is supposed to be.

11. In the end, we should not be surprised to find that receiving the Holy Spirit is an initial experience in Acts. After all, this is exactly what Acts 2:38 told us from the very beginning. In this verse, Peter tells the crowds in Jerusalem exactly how to get right with God: "Repent and let each of you be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." There it is in plain sight. Receiving the Spirit is part of the initial event of becoming part of the end times people of God. [5]

Indeed, I would come to realize that the nearly exclusive focus on entire sanctification in my understanding of the Spirit had clouded a fundamental aspect of New Testament theology. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is the indicator that one is part of the end times or eschatological people of God. A Gentile like me could repent. I could make a confession of my sins and a confession of faith in Christ. I could even be baptized as Acts 8 shows, and yet not yet be saved.

Receiving the Holy Spirit is the sine qua non of membership in the people of God in Acts and Paul. How could I have missed it? Romans 8:9 says that if someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they don't belong to him. 2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:14 both talk about the Spirit as the arrabon or "earnest" of our future inheritance. 

Anyone who has bought a home knows that "earnest money" is money that both guarantees that you are the one getting the home and that serves as an initial deposit toward the purchase of that home. Accordingly, the New International Version (NIV) translates the word as a deposit that guarantees our inheritance. Again, this is about the initial "purchase." The language relates to the event of joining the people of God.

2 Corinthians 1:22 also refers to the Holy Spirit as "sealing" us. Some of the older holiness preachers and writers took this sealing as something like the sealing of a jar -- a finishing work as it were. But the NIV rightly adds the words "of ownership." The Holy Spirit is a seal of ownership, like a brand on a horse or an embossing seal on a book. Once again, we are talking about an initial experience.

I would come to realize that I had completely missed one of the most fundamental dimensions of "pneumatology" -- the theology of the Spirit -- in the New Testament. To be fair, I would learn that Wesleyan theology also believes in "initial sanctification." Wesleyan theology believes that we receive the Spirit when we "get saved." I just don't remember ever hearing this preached growing up because the focus of encountering the Spirit focused almost exclusively on a second event in the Christian life. But, as it turned out, the New Testament focuses almost exclusively on an initial event. 

12. Interestingly, I would also learn in seminary that John Wesley himself didn't preach or teach sanctification by way of the stories of Acts. For him, passages that talk about perfection in the King James Version were more frequently used (e.g., Matt. 5:48; Heb. 6:1). He also equated sanctification with an experience of perfect love (1 John 4:17-18). Accordingly, we can still believe in entire sanctification even if we don't equate it with Acts 2.

Nevertheless, in my mind, the dissociation of sanctification from Acts 2 has contributed significantly to the decline in preaching on sanctification. It's just easier to picture sanctification if we place it in a story form, which is why I believe Acts 4:31 can be very helpful. Wesley's more heady sermons just require more mental effort. 

Larry Wood, who taught theology at Asbury at the same time as Bob Lyon, has tried hard to show that Wesley himself assented to preaching holiness from Acts. [6] The ultimate origin of this approach was John Fletcher, who was also part of the British holiness movement. Wood has shown that Wesley knew of Fletcher's approach and assented to it.

However, there is a big difference between an assent we can find in the footnotes of history and the clear way that Wesley approached sanctification in the bulk of his writings and preaching. Here again our paradigms are in play. If you create a word cloud of Wesley in relation to the teaching of Christian perfection and sanctification, Acts hardly features at all. [7]

13. Let me return to the key point of this chapter. While in this second part I have deconstructed to some extent the way the holiness movement preached sanctification from Acts, the goal is not to deconstruct the preaching of holiness or entire sanctification. The goal is to clear the ground for an approach that is exegetically sound. Preaching on holiness will not increase if we insist on forcing it on texts that do not want to bear it!

Instead, I have suggested that Acts 4:31 is a much more fruitful text, even if it was not specifically about entire sanctification. What Acts 4:31 tells us is that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit more than once. We can be filled with the Holy Spirit for specific purposes. We can be empowered for certain tasks. 

One of those special empowerments can be when we have fully surrendered our lives to God to the extent we know. This logically opens the door for the fullness of the Spirit in our lives. We will continue to explore this possibility in the chapters to come.

[3] Neither of these instances indicate they refer to a second experience. Rather, they seem to refer to the initial event of joining the Jesus movement.

[4] Some have cleverly tried to argue that the disciples first received the Spirit in John 20:22 where Jesus tells the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit. But this verse is not part of the story world of Luke-Acts. In Luke-Acts, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise and there is no place for another filling in between. At most, we might take John 10:22 as John's allusion to the Day of Pentecost, not as a separate event. It is part of John's story world but not Acts'.

[5] For simplicity, I will avoid discussion of the fact that these Jews were already part of the people of God. It's much easier to speak of the Gentiles in Acts 10 becoming part of the people of God since they were not Jews. I've decided to use the imprecise language here of joining the eschatological people of God, which is the renewed Israel which includes Gentiles.

[6] Laurence W. Wood, The Meaning of Pentecost in Early Methodism: Rediscovering John Fletcher as Wesley's Vindicator and Designated Successor (Scarecrow, 2002). 

[7] It is an interesting feature of human thinking that, if we can show an exceptional piece of data, we will behave as if it is sufficient to undermine an entire paradigm. One example of a bad actor is used to portray everyone in a certain category as bad. The possibility that the data can be read differently is used to dismiss the most probable reading of the data on the whole. In this case, the fact that Wesley may have been ok with the use of Acts to preach entire sanctification clearly doesn't change the fact that in the overwhelming majority of his preaching and writings, he didn't preach it that way.

1. Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)

Preface: A Sanctification Story 
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1. The disciples had followed Jesus for three years. They were already "Christians," you might say. But God had something more for them. On the Day of Pentecost, he baptized them with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2). They become sanctified.

"Oh, send the old-time power, the Pentecostal power. Thy floodgates of blessing on us pour open wide." That's what the holiness hymn of my childhood said. There were others. "The Comforter has come. The Comforter has come. The Holy Ghost from heaven, the Father's promise giv'n."

This was how the experience of entire sanctification was grounded in the preaching of my childhood. It was easily understood. Once you are saved, God still has yet another spiritual experience for you. We see it throughout Acts. Cornelius the Gentile was already a God-worshipper. He was already "saved." But in Acts 10, God sanctifies him and the other Gentile God-fearers.

I actually did an Honors Project in college exploring the "psychology" of sanctification. I went through these examples in Acts. One of the strongest arguments for this understanding came in Acts 8. The Samaritans had believed and had been baptized. But something was missing. So Peter and John come up from Jerusalem, lay hands on them, and the Samaritans receive the Holy Spirit. They were saved, but now they are sanctified.

The American Holiness movement connected the experience of entire sanctification with the Day of Pentecost. This connection created a powerful narrative to preach sanctification. It was easily understood in this story form, and we preached holiness in America this way for nearly two centuries.

2. We almost never hear sanctification preached in this way today. Why? Because the book of Acts doesn't really talk about the Spirit-fillings of Acts in terms of entire sanctification. There is one verse -- Acts 15:9. It describes what the Gentiles of Acts 10 experienced as the purification of their hearts. But was this verse really talking about a second experience of God's grace or the initial one when their sins were forgiven?

I will explore the exegesis of these passages in Acts later on in this chapter. For now, I'll just say that the process of re-interpreting these events in Acts was a painful one for me, something that happened in seminary at Asbury. I would discover that there aren't really any biblical scholars -- even in the Wesleyan tradition -- who currently see these Spirit-fillings in Acts as examples of entire sanctification. Bob Lyon, a professor at Asbury, is often credited for this shift in the movement in the 1980s.

Whether he was right or wrong exegetically, there's little question that this shift had a massive impact on the preaching of holiness in the Wesleyan tradition. Melvin Dieter, a well-known Wesleyan historian of the previous generation, attributed the decline of the holiness movement to this change in understanding more than anything else. In 1995, Keith Drury would agitate with his pronouncement that "the holiness movement is dead." [1] He did not connect its death to this shift in the interpretation of Acts, but his infamous speech coincided with these developments.

3. However, in my mind, that is not the end of the story. I will dot the i's and cross the t's later in this chapter. For now, I want to reclaim Acts as a model for entire sanctification. But I want to look at a different passage than Acts 2, 8, or 10. I want to look at Acts 4.

"And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they continued speaking the word of God with boldness." Acts 4:31

This verse is about a second experience of the Holy Spirit that the disciples -- now apostles -- had. The context is that they had been hauled in before the Sanhedrin and commanded not to speak in the name of Jesus. They had been rebuked. But they chose to obey God rather than man. 

They gathered together and prayed. They determined to continue to preach Christ despite persecution. And when they finished praying, God filled them with his Spirit again, giving them the power to continue witnessing in Jesus' name.

More than anything else, the Spirit-fillings of Acts are about power. "You will receive power," Jesus told the disciples in Acts 1:8, "when the Holy Spirit has come on you." From Acts 4:31 we learn that such experiences of power are not a one-time thing. We can receive power from the Holy Spirit whenever we need it. Acts especially highlights the corporate nature of such fillings with the Spirit. But Paul as an individual can also be filled with the Spirit (Acts 9:17). 

I like to think of these Spirit-fillings as plugging in. We all know the experience of a battery running out. I myself use a laptop constantly. I might go to a coffee shop and work there for a couple hours. I go to restaurants or to meetings. More often than not, I don't take my charger with me.

But, eventually, it runs out of juice. I have to plug back in. I have to recharge. The Spirit-fillings of Acts are like that too. There is the initial charging -- powering up -- that takes place when a person first comes to Christ and is baptized. But there is a need to keep plugged into the Spirit as well. 

In Acts 4, the apostles are recharged. Preaching in the face of persecution takes a lot of spiritual juice. And the Spirit promises to keep us powered up. The word Advocate that is used of the Holy Spirit in John 14-16 is often pictured as the Holy Spirit being alongside us (para-kletos). While John probably didn't have that picture in mind, it is not an incorrect picture. [2] The Holy Spirit does indeed come alongside us to give us the spiritual power we need.

4. We need power to walk the Christian walk too. We don't need this power just one time when we come to Christ. We need this power constantly.

Christians do not believe that we can be righteous in our own power. We do not believe that we can do good without God's help. "All have sinned," Romans 3:23 tells us. We will explore Romans 7 in a later chapter, but who doesn't identify with its description of the person who can't seem to do the good he or she wants to do but rather finds themselves doing the opposite (Rom. 7:19)?

Against this backdrop, the picture of the disciples being filled with the Holy Spirit in Acts 4:31 provides a great picture of our longing to be able to live the life of righteousness that God desires us to live. Do you find yourself unable to "do the good you want to do"? Pray to the Father, and he will send the Holy Spirit to empower you for righteousness.

Are you living less than the life God has called you to live? Pray to be filled with the Holy Spirit. This is a thoroughly biblical prayer, asking God for the power to be who God wants you to be. And it is a prayer that God wants to answer. It is a prayer modeled by the apostles in the book of Acts.

5. What does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit? In the book of Acts, being filled with the Holy Spirit means two things: purity and power. By far, the book of Acts highlights power as the consequence of being filled with the Spirit. More than anything else in Acts, it is a power for witness. It gives the apostles boldness to preach despite opposition.

Yes, tongues are often involved in Acts. In Acts 2, we get the impression that these tongues are human languages and that their primary function was for witness. It is also important to note that tongues does not always accompany being filled with the Spirit in Acts. The apostles don't speak in tongues in Acts 4:31, for example. Paul doesn't speak in tongues in Acts 9:17-18. The Samaritans do not speak in tongues in Acts 8:17. To connect tongues too closely with being filled with the Spirit is a distraction.

It is also a power to perform miracles. It is no coincidence that, in the chapter after they receive the Holy Spirit for the first time, Peter and John heal a lame man. This is a fulfillment of Acts 1:8 too. In John 14:12, Jesus tells his disciples that they will do greater things than he has done. In the context, the Holy Spirit is the basis for this promise. 

We see the promise fulfilled throughout the book of Acts. The book of Acts powerfully teaches that the things that Jesus did on earth can be done by Jesus' followers as well. What Jesus does by the power of the Holy Spirit in Luke, Peter does by the power of the Spirit in Acts. Then later, Paul will do the same things in Acts as well. They are drawing a line by the Holy Spirit to us today.

Jesus healed a lame man and raised the dead. Peter healed a lame man and raised the dead. Paul healed a lame man and raised the dead. So also we, by the power of the Holy Spirit, can heal and raise the dead.

A close look at the way Acts uses the expressions "being filled with," "being baptized in," and "receiving" the Holy Spirit suggests that these are often synonymous. However, "being baptized with" and "receiving" always refer to an initial experience. By contrast, the apostles could be "filled with" the Holy Spirit as many times as they needed to be.

6. Acts 15:9 hints of something else going on here. Being filled with the Holy Spirit is purifying as well. The sins of the disciples were cleansed by the newly shed blood of Jesus Christ on the Day of Pentecost. The sins of the Gentiles with Cornelius were cleansed in Acts 10 when they were baptized in the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts does not highlight this aspect of Spirit-filling, but it shows that cleansing was part of receiving the Spirit. It was an assumption hiding in the text even if it was not the focus.

What happens to us spiritually when we are filled with the Holy Spirit? Galatians 5:22-25 seems like an entirely appropriate passage for us to turn to. What are the fruit of the Spirit? Why a person filled with the Spirit should demonstrate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Indeed, if a person claims to be filled with the Holy Spirit yet does not demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit, it calls into question their claim. This was one of the puzzling aspects of the holiness movement of my childhood. Few in my generation think of joy or love when we think of our holiness past. We tend to think more of harshness, legalism, and divisiveness. No doubt this flavor was a contributing factor to the demise of holiness preaching.

7. Doesn't it stand to reason that, if there is still sin in your life, there is still room for more of the Holy Spirit in your life? Doesn't it stand to reason that, if there are parts of your life that you have not given to God, it is a barrier to the Holy Spirit in your life? 

The American Holiness movement did have an expression, "the fullness of the Holy Spirit. It is not entirely a biblical expression, although some passages come close (e.g., Eph. 3:19). I have always liked it. Yes, you can be filled with the Spirit because you need strength. But wouldn't it be nice to have the fullness of the Spirit?

What would the fullness of the Spirit look like? For a cup to be full of something, the cup has to be empty of everything else. But if we are holding something back from God, then our cup is not empty. We cannot have the fullness of God if there are things contrary to God still in our cup.

While this is not exactly a biblical image, it is a picture built out of biblical truths. God wants all of us. He is Lord. "If Jesus isn't Lord of all, he isn't Lord at all," the saying goes. God is God. He owns it all and wants us to give him our all.

What if we could reach a point in our spiritual walk where we finally surrender everything we know to surrender to God? Wouldn't that prepare us to receive the fullness of God that we can receive? Unfortunately, our lives are not static. There are always new things to give to God. There are often things we do not know we haven't given to God.

But there is always a first time. There should be a point in everyone's walk with God where we give everything to him for the first time. In response, God fills us to the brim with his Spirit. This is a storyline that Acts 4:31 supports. We get to the point of need, and God meets us at our need. He fills us with his Holy Spirit.

We want to explore this picture of entire sanctification in the pages that follow. In the final chapter especially, we will explore how we can preach and teach with biblical integrity this goal of full living in the Spirit in our Christian walk...

[1] https://www.drurywriting.com/keith/dead.htm

[2] This is called the "etymological fallacy," when you interpret a word by looking at its history or breaking it apart (para + kaleo). This just isn't how we use words. For example, the word understand doesn't mean to stand under something. The word parakletos in Greek meant an advocate or helper. It didn't mean someone who is "called alongside" you.

 

Preface: A Sanctification Story

I want to take a brief pause from my writing on hermeneutics to crank out a little book I've been wanting to write on entire sanctification. I'm thinking of the title, "A Brief Guide to Wesleyan Holiness" (suggestions welcome). Last year Chris Bounds did an ordination course on Holiness, not to mention a book he co-authored. Steve Deneff also did a microcourse on "Understanding Holiness."

But none of these really satisfy me. Not long after working with these courses, I thought I would take a shot. I've played around with the outline, trying to find an optimal approach. So here we go. A Preface and five chapters. Here's the Preface.
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Preface: A Sanctification Story
1. I grew up regularly hearing sermons about “getting sanctified.” As a boy, I quickly learned that I needed to “get saved” so I would go to heaven when I died (or when the rapture happened). But salvation wasn’t the end of the journey. There was another crucial experience after salvation that I needed as well, and I needed to begin seeking it as soon as I was saved. That is, I also needed to be entirely sanctified.

I was never a touchy-feely, experiential person growing up. I often felt like I stood outside my emotions looking on. I identified with Spock in the original Star Trek series. He had deep emotions, but they were buried out of sight and under lock and key. Probably because of what I heard preached and modeled, I associated the experiences of salvation and sanctification with emotional experiences -- experiences that I did not immediately find forthcoming despite my willingness and regular prayers for them.

2. As a side note, I have found Chris Bounds’ analysis particularly insightful on the timing of sanctification. [1] He observes that the Wesleyan tradition has sometimes preached a "longer way" to sanctification, sometimes a "shorter way," and sometimes a "middle way." In his later years, John Wesley himself (1703-91), the originator of our tradition, tended to see "Christian perfection" as something that only a few would experience. Even then, it would mostly be toward the end of their lives. However, there are precedents for all three views in Wesley's preaching and writings.

In the 1830s, a woman in New York City named Phoebe Palmer (1807-74) tried to reclaim some of Wesley's earlier optimism that sanctification could happen much sooner in life and be the regular experience of believers. In Palmer’s time, many Methodists leaned toward the "longer way" view of sanctification, seeing it as a gradual process rather than an immediate experience. [2] She began to teach a "shorter way" to sanctification -- one available immediately by faith.

This is the view that would inspire the holiness revivals of the late 1800s, and it was the view of holiness with which I grew up in the late 1900s. Unfortunately, it sometimes disintegrated into what Keith Drury called "two tripism" in his classic book, Holiness for Ordinary People. [3] There are stories of people who, after just returning from the altar to get saved, were told that they needed to turn around and go right back to get sanctified. You might get saved one Sunday and then go to get sanctified the next.

In Holiness, Bounds describes the view of the Church of the Nazarene as one where, if you completely surrender everything to God, you should believe by faith that you have been entirely sanctified whether you have a noticeable emotional experience or not. [4] You might call it a "name it claim it" view. Say everything is God's and claim by faith that you are sanctified.

By contrast, Bounds suggests that the most appropriate approach is the "middle way." [5] On the one hand, it is more optimistic than to relegate sanctification to a few lucky ones right before they die. At the same time, the shorter way can border on a heresy known as Pelagianism. Pelagius (ca. 354-418) more or less taught that we had it within our own power to choose God and do good. The church would deem this a heresy, teaching that we can only do good and choose God when God empowers us to be able to do so. [6]

The "name it, claim it" view of sanctification seems to put sanctification into our hands and into our power. Some versions of the "shorter way" risk making sanctification seem like a human decision rather than a divine work. We can become sanctified at a time of our choosing. Bounds, on the other hand, insists that sanctification is always a matter of God's choosing. By God's grace, we can prepare ourselves. We can cooperate with God's grace to consecrate and surrender ourselves, but sanctification is ultimately God's act rather than our act. Accordingly, the timing is up to God. 

3. After much agony, I did testify to salvation. I experienced a moment of peace that I could point to as the moment of my salvation. Then, the agony began again – seeking the experience of sanctification. If I had known the teaching of Bounds, I could have rested in God’s timing. But that is not the way I heard the preaching on this topic. Whether intentional or not, the preaching I grew up with put the responsibility for sanctification on me.

More than once, I heard sermons use the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32 as a model for sanctification. “If you want to be sanctified enough,” the sermon went, “if you will not let God go until he blesses you, then he will sanctify you.” In other words, being sanctified was about how much I wanted it. If I would truly give everything to God, then he would certainly bless me with sanctification if I wanted it enough.

In my opinion, this preaching was basically Pelagian. Yes, we need to get to a place of full surrender to God. When the Spirit reveals aspects of our lives that we have not given fully to God, we need to hand them over. But then the waiting begins. God gets to choose when we will experience his work in us. We have no reason to think he will delay long, but it is an important truth that it is God's decision.

4. It was a January morning in my first year of college. I would drive back to college in two steps. The first stint would take me four hours to my sister's house. Her husband pastored a church and the parsonage was next to the church. Then the next day I would drive the rest of the way.

As I drove north, I began to agonize over entire sanctification. "If you really wanted the experience," the voice in my head said, "you would not leave Lakeland for Central until you had received the blessing." I had the picture of Jacob wrestling with the angel in my mind. "If you were really serious about entire sanctification, you wouldn't go back to college until you were sanctified."

My past experience told me that it could be a long time before I felt something. I had struggled off and on to have the feeling that I was saved for years. How long would it take before I felt like I had experienced sanctification? I wanted to get back to college!

Yet I felt like I must wait. I had just felt a call to ministry. My whole vocation was going to be focused on preaching the word and being a spiritual model. I had to clear up the matter of my sanctification. 

I finally surrendered. Yes. I wouldn't leave Lakeland until I had experienced entire sanctification -- even if I missed the spring semester.

At that moment of surrender, I felt a release and a great peace. When I arrived at the church in Lakeland, I went into the sanctuary and thanked God. My trip was not delayed.

5. Looking back, I thank God for his mercy. I doubt that God was behind the moments of torture that I experienced on that drive. Perhaps it was my own neurosis. Perhaps it was the Devil testing me. But the Lord stooped to my weakness, and for that I am grateful.

I have reflected much more extensively on the Wesleyan doctrine of holiness since those days in college. My ministry came to focus especially on teaching Scripture, and I was particularly interested in the biblical view of holiness during my studies. In fact, part of the reason I ended up focusing on Hebrews was its teaching on sanctification.

In the following pages, I want to share some of the insights that I believe came out of those years of study. I have remained Wesleyan. Nevertheless, my understanding of various verses has been refined over the years. I continue to believe that all believers will ideally come to a point where they need to surrender everything to God. And it is only then that we can have the fullness of the Spirit empowering our lives. 

I invite you to explore the topic of "entire sanctification" with me.

[1] Matt Ayers, Christopher T. Bounds, Caleb T. Friedeman, Holiness: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Theology (InterVarsity, 2023), 334-41.

[2] Kevin M. Watson, Doctrine, Spirit, & Discipline: A History of the Wesleyan Tradition in the United States (Zondervan, 2024), 204-7.

[3] Keith Drury, Holiness for Ordinary People 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, 2004).

[4] Holiness, 337.

[5] Holiness, 355-58.

[6] The difference between Wesleyans and Calvinists is not about God's empowerment but about the role of our wills. Calvinists view God's grace as entire and all-or-nothing. Saving grace is like an on-off switch that God either turns on entirely or he doesn't. Salvation is a matter of "monergism" -- the sole action of God.

By contrast, I've likened the Wesleyan view of God's grace to something more like a dimmer switch. God turns up his grace enough for us to signify a desire for more if we choose. Then he turns his grace up more until eventually we are regenerated. In this case, our empowered wills cooperate with God's grace. Salvation is a matter of synergism -- a working together of God's will with our will.

Wesleyans therefore reject Pelagianism just as Calvinists do.

9. The New Testament and Old Testament Law

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2. Adventures in Interpretation

3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context

5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

7. Keeping the Sabbath
8. The Sabbath as Conviction
_______________________
11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics. In the pre-modern, unreflective interpretation of my childhood, the entire Bible pretty much was flattened out in its meaning. Instruction in Deuteronomy might apply directly to today just as much as a verse from Philippians. There was sometimes little distinction between the "old" covenant and the "new" covenant. 

Our tradition did process some verses differently. We could eat pork chops without a thought, for example (Lev. 11:7-8). But a family member once suggested a mustache was inappropriate because of Leviticus 19:27: "Do not mar the corners of your beard." 

Why was one binding and the other not? I don't think the reasons were very well thought out. We were just following our traditions which made sense to us because we grew up with them.

Someone might say, "The prohibition on pork was part of the ceremonial law, which Jesus did away with. We are not under law but under grace" (Rom. 6:14). But then my mother might say, "Jesus said that he did not come to destroy the law. Not one jot or tittle will pass from the law" (Matt. 5:17-18). 

I needed a consistent hermeneutic. How can we tell what still applies directly to us and what doesn't? What is "all time," and what is "that time"?

Sacrifices
12. I have resonated with something that G. B. Caird of Oxford used to teach. Start with what seems clear and then move toward what is unclear. So let's start with sacrifices: Leviticus 1-5. The way for a Christian to apply these chapters to today seems very clear.

I don't know of any Christian groups today that offer sacrifices (although never say never). There are no Jewish groups that offer sacrifices today -- only the Samaritans, who still exist as a people group. I have it on eyewitness accounts that some Jews have accrued some red heifers for a time when the temple is re-constructed. But let's establish with clarity before it happens that there is NO PLACE for reconstituted sacrifices from a Christian biblical perspective.

Why? Because of the book of Hebrews clearly says so. "With one sacrifice, Christ has perfected forever those who are being sanctified" (Heb. 10:14). The chapter begins by saying that the Levitical sacrifices never were able to perfect those who offered them (10:1). If they could have, they would have stopped being offered (10:2). 10:4 goes one step further: "It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins."

Let that sink in. Hebrews implies that not a single Old Testament sacrifice was actually effective in itself to take away sins! They were rather foreshadowings of the one effective sacrifice of Christ. Without us, none of the people of Israel were able to be perfected -- not even Moses (Heb. 11:40). Similarly, Hebrews 7:19 says, "the Law perfected nothing."

Let's be very clear here in case some kooky Christian group should pop up saying the contrary. To say that sacrifices are still needed or could be valid in some way today would be an affront to Christ. Hebrews is definitive. No other sacrifice was EVER effective in itself to take away sins. NOT A SINGLE animal sacrifice was ever anything but a pointer to Christ. Anything else would be blasphemy because it would negate the sacrificial work of Christ.

13. This issue is pretty easy for Christians, including for those who see a strong continuity between the Old Testament and today. Old Testament sacrifices were symbols of the sacrifice of Christ. They foreshadowed his one offering. They were calls for a raincheck. They were promises, and Christ was the fulfillment. 

In this way, the sacrifices of Leviticus were fully valid, but they were not meant to be permanent. We do not have to literally offer them today because their true meaning was found in Jesus' death on the cross. We "keep" them by trusting in the atoning death of Christ.

However, let me be clear about something else. No one in the Old Testament understood this plan. In fact, I doubt many of the earliest Christians understood Christ's death to be a full replacement of the temple sacrificial system. Paul offers a sacrifice in Acts 21:26. I have argued that it was not until after the temple was destroyed that the scope of Christ's sacrifice really began to sink in. 

I know an Old Testament professor who once suggested that, if you had told the author of Leviticus about Jesus, he would have said, "Of course, that's what these sacrifices were about." Let me say that I cannot imagine that would be the case in the slightest. In fact, the thought seems ludicrous to me. 

Sacrifices were pervasive in the ancient world. While some prophets rightly indicted those who used them as an excuse for unrighteousness (e.g., 1 Sam. 15:22-23; Isa. 1:11-17; Jer. 7:21-23; Hos. 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Mic. 6:6-8), it's hard to imagine that any of these prophets imagined sacrifices would ever go away.

It makes sense to us that they are no longer necessary because we grew up with this understanding. No one questions it in the church today and not even Jews offer sacrifices. It is an "easy issue" because it isn't debated in our traditions today. But it was not an easy issue in the first century, and it wouldn't have been at all in Old Testament times. However, given Hebrews, it should be an easy issue for biblical Christians.

It does illustrate a fundamental hermeneutical principle. From a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides more final answers and more precise understandings than the Old Testament. In this case, Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament instruction, and we no longer need to offer animal sacrifices.

Israel-Specific Law
14. Many Christians make a distinction between the "ceremonial law" and the "moral law" of the Old Testament. Bible scholars regularly point out that this is an anachronistic distinction. Jews did not consider circumcision or the food laws to be "ceremonial." Jews kept the whole Law because it was all part of God's covenant with Israel.

How then can we differentiate the parts of the Old Testament that Paul seems to consider less binding from the parts he considers fully binding? Suffice it to say, there are countless scholarly books written on this subject. I was present at a multi-day colloquium once that tried to solve the question of "Paul and the Law." They failed to come to a consensus.

Here's how I have come to parse Paul on the Law. Paul himself tells us that "to the Jews I became as a Jew that I might gain Jews. To those under the Law I became as someone under the Law (though I am not under the Law) in order that I might gain those under the Law" (1 Cor. 9:20). Similarly he says, "to those without the Law I became as one without the Law (although I am not without the law of God but I am under the law of Christ) in order that I might gain those without the Law" (9:21).

We have to be careful because Paul's words are almost always "vectored," by which I mean he presents his positions to move his audiences in particular directions. He is a good rhetorician. He puts things in a certain way to try to have a certain effect. For example, I suspect that Paul largely observed the Jewish Law himself (cf. Acts 21:24, also vectored in the opposite direction).

But the key is this. For Paul, the mission to the Gentiles had complexified the question of the Law. He was furious at Antioch when Peter wouldn't eat with Gentiles over fears they would defile him (Gal. 2:11-14). These experiences were formative. As long as they weren't sexually immoral, Paul had no time for those Jewish believers who wouldn't associate with Gentile believers. To him, someone who had kept the Law so scrupulously as a Pharisee, they were hypocrites.

The distinction was not between the ceremonial and the moral for him. It was between aspects of the Law that applied to both Jew and Gentile and those commands that got in the way of the Gentile mission. I call the latter "Israel-specific law." Circumcision? It got in the way. It was Israel-specific. Gentiles were justified by faith and didn't need to be circumcised. In fact, he told the Gentile Galatians they would fall from grace if they did it (Gal. 5:4).

I suspect that what Paul was doing was more or less giving full status to those Gentile God-fearers who had faith in Christ. God-fearers didn't need to be circumcised. God-fearers did not need to observe the Jewish food laws. When Paul determined they could be justified by faith, they did not need to do anything more than they had done before as God-fearers. Meanwhile, for Paul, Jews who kept those particulars did not have any greater status before God because faith was the standard.

This became the normative position for Gentile Christianity. Mark 7:19 is a parenthetical remark from Mark that reflects this perspective of the Pauline mission toward Gentiles ("all foods are clean"). (Matthew, by the way, did not include that parenthetical remark if it was in the copy of Mark he used.) Gentiles were not expected to keep the Jewish food laws.

Christ's Law
15. Although Paul does not systematize his thinking, there are clearly parts of the Jewish Law that he considered binding on Gentile Christians. For example, there isn't a sexual prohibition from Leviticus 18 that Paul mentions that he did not consider to be binding on the Gentile church. What makes the difference? He doesn't explain. It may seem obvious to us, but it probably seemed a little arbitrary to some first-century Christians that he would consider the sexual commands binding but the Sabbath commands not.

Paul did see the love command as the essence of all Christian ethics (Rom. 13:10), as did Jesus (Matt. 22:37-40). Perhaps that is what he means by "Christ's law" in 1 Cor. 9: 21. I suspect something of this sort is what he means in Romans 2:14 when he talks about Gentiles who keep the Law even though they don't have the Law by nature like Jews do. They weren't circumcised so by definition they didn't keep the Law, so Paul must have some essence of the Law in view rather than the full Law.

The bottom line is that he does expect all believers to keep a certain core of the Law. He not only considers this core universal, but you will not make it to the kingdom if you persist in not keeping these key elements (cf. 1 Cor. 6:9-10). Most if not all of this core correlates to the love command for him.

16. So what do we make of Matthew 5:17: "Do not think that I have come to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to destroy, but to fulfill." If you read 5:17-20 in isolation from the rest of the chapter, you might come away with the way many have read these verses, namely, that God requires us to keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

But the rest of the chapter explains what Jesus means. For example, simply not killing doesn't fulfill the commandment. If you hate, you've violated it. Similarly, not doing the act of adultery (or getting together with another woman by divorce) does not fulfill the commandment if you lust in your heart or discard your wife legally because you want another woman.

This is not simply a matter of keeping each commandment even harder. With regard to keeping vows, Jesus says not even to make them. This is not a deepening of the third commandment. It removes the very making of vows in the first place. It changes the assumptions of the command. 

Even further, Jesus contradicts instruction to Israel to take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Deut. 19:21). While Deuteronomy tells Israel to show no pity, Jesus tells individuals to turn the other cheek. He contrasts his teaching with the commandment.

It seems clear to me that fulfilling the Law in Matthew 5 doesn't mean keeping every "least" commandment in the Law (like not trimming beards, not eating pork, circumcising). It seems to mean loving your neighbor (and enemy) down to the least matter (Matt. 5:43-48). Once again, the New Testament gives the definitive verdict on how to keep the Old Testament Law.

17. Let me sum up the two big hermeneutical principles that were developing as I processed the Bible in my final years of college. The first is that every word of the Bible was first written to ancient audiences. The first meanings were meanings from their world in their languages and in their contexts and situations. Not a word of the Bible was originally written to me.

That means that I am always forced to process the distance between that time and my time. Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it has a different meaning today than it did them. Simply applying the words to today blindly can result in everything from the bizarre (veil head coverings) to that which is contrary to the trajectory of the kingdom (slavery).

The second principle is that, from a Christian perspective, the New Testament provides a key lens on the Old Testament, although thus far was have only talked about the Law. This fact suggests that we cannot securely apply the Old Testament directly to today until we have taken the New Testament into account. 

The application of the Bible to today must first "integrate" the biblical material itself into a biblical theology. The application of Scripture should come from "What does the Bible as a whole say?" far more than "What does this individual verse say?"

These insights took time to develop. No doubt as I return to my personal narrative you will see some of the process that led to these fuller hermeneutical conclusions. Let me return now to a key event that took place in my final semester of college.

8. Sabbath as Conviction

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
7. Keeping the Sabbath
_______________________
7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? 

Here's where we get to the crucial part. In Colossians 2:16, Paul and Timothy tell the Colossians not to let anyone judge them because of their non-observance of laws relating to "food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath." The mention of the Sabbath suggests that the "philosophy" that Paul and Timothy are warning about is a Jewish one or at least a pseudo-Jewish one. From the description, it is more religious than philosophy as we think of it.

What do Paul and Timothy tell this overwhelmingly Gentile congregation (cf. 2:11)? He tells them not to let anyone condemn them if they do not keep the food laws or the Sabbath as the Jews do. That is to say, he does not require Gentile believers to keep the Jewish Sabbath.

Let that sink in. They don't say, "You don't have to observe Saturday specifically, but be sure to take one day of rest to keep the Ten Commandments." They don't say, "Keep the principle of the Sabbath although you don't have to keep the letter." Paul simply tells the Gentile Colossians that they are not obligated to keep the Sabbath.

8. The Wesleyan Discipline used to have a statement in the Special Directions about "merchandizing on the Sabbath." Again, it was moved from membership requirements at some point to this special section so that the values of the traditionalists remained on the books, but the rule was not technically required. Clever politics again. 

(Again, mind you, the Sabbath was never Sunday in the Bible, so we never kept the biblical Sabbath in our history. This rule was about Sunday, which is never the Sabbath in Scripture.)

I was present at the General Conference where that language was completely removed. There was a brief rabbinic moment. A person representing the older holiness wing of the church stood up and said, "I wonder what Nehemiah would say about what we are doing given how strongly he forbid Israel from buying and selling on the Sabbath."

Then someone else stood up and read from Romans 14:5-6: "One person considers one day above another. Another person considers every day the same. Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind. The one who minds the day minds it to the Lord." The context of this statement is Paul talking about how Christians with different convictions should get along with each other. Clearly, matters of the Jewish Law are under discussion, especially the food laws.

Romans 14 won the day at the General Conference. The prohibition on merchandizing on the Sabbath was removed from The Discipline

9. Paul's instruction in Romans 14 was to 1) operate on the basis of faith and giving glory to God and 2) be fully convinced. You can be wrongly convinced, of course (14:22). 

So one person is truly and fully convinced of what God requires of them. (Some people no doubt fool themselves or try to get away with things, but God is not fooled. That's God's business to sort out.) Then, another person is truly and fully convinced of something else. They both will stand individually before God.

So one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must keep the kosher food laws. No pork. No blood. No eel. Another believer -- probably Gentile -- wants to eat pork. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." Both are equally spiritual in God's eyes if they are truly operating from faith.

Similarly, one person -- probably Jewish -- believes he or she must set aside sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday as a Sabbath. They will not work on this day. They will not buy or sell on this day. No problem, Paul says. "Let each be fully convinced in his or her own mind." 

But another person -- probably Gentile -- treats every day as God's day. They give every day to the glory of God. They live for the Lord on every day. They do not set aside a Sabbath or a special day of rest without work. Paul considers this person of equal spirituality to the other person if he or she is truly operating from faith.

Romans 14 indicates that two people can do exactly the same thing and one be sinning while the other isn't. The key is whether the action proceeds from faith (Rom. 14:23). One person does not set aside the Jewish Sabbath but does so fully convinced that it is not required of him or her and in full faith, giving every day to the Lord equally. He or she is not sinning. 

Another doubts significantly. He or she also does not keep the Sabbath but deep down really believes they should. He or she is not truly convinced and is actually resisting the Lord. That person is sinning.

10. On a side note, as someone who struggled with doubt, I don't think that Paul had the kind of navel-gazing in mind that I used to do when he talks about not having faith. James' comments on the "double-minded man" were once torture to me (Jas. 1:6-8). However, I believe hyper-introspection is largely a modern phenomenon, perhaps a hangover from the Romantic era of the late 1700s/early 1800s. 

I suspect Paul and James would look at young hyper-introspective Ken as crazy. "What's wrong with you man?" Being double-minded, I suspect, was about having clearly divided loyalties, not about neurotic introspection. Introspective doubts are doubts about yourself, while the doubts Paul and James have in mind are doubts about serving God.

11. I had a Sabbath discussion once with someone from my holiness background and presented what seems to me the clear teaching of Paul. There are no passages in the New Testament that instruct believers to keep the Sabbath. In fact, Jesus himself was criticized for not keeping the Sabbath the way his opponents thought it should be kept. His response was that he was Lord of the Sabbath (Mark 2:28).

Mind you, I assume that most Jewish Christians -- including Paul -- largely continued to observe the Sabbath. But it seems to me that Gentile believers felt less constrained to keep it. And Paul does not seem to have put any pressure on them to keep it.

In the discussion I had with someone, the other person noted that the Sabbath commandment goes back to creation (Exod. 20:11). Doesn't that imply that it is universal, that it is built into the universe?

My response? "I know. Isn't it crazy? Paul doesn't care." 

That is to say, it doesn't seem to be of any concern to Paul that he is telling Gentile believers that they do not have to keep one of the Ten Commandments. It doesn't seem to bother him that, in a real sense, he is making the keeping of the fourth commandment culturally or individually relative. If you are a Jew, keep it. If you are not, it's a matter of personal conviction.

This seems to me the clear meaning of the text. Only our own faulty assumptions make it difficult. Paul doesn't seem to care. Whether Gentiles keep the Jewish Sabbath is a matter of personal conscience and conviction for him.

11. This is where we step back and talk about hermeneutics... 

7. Keeping the Sabbath

 Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I
6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?
_______________________
1. I've already shared a bit about my family's theology of the Sabbath growing up. First, we understood Sunday to be the Sabbath. We certainly went to Sunday School, morning and evening services on Sunday. We did not believe you should have a job on Sunday, and we did not buy or sell on Sunday to cause others to have to work. We didn't have a problem with cooking on Sunday.

In our family, we did not watch TV on Sunday, although exceptions could be made. We didn't generally throw a baseball or do sports on Sunday. It was to be set aside as a fairly serious day. We often took a nap on Sundays, which we called the "Wesleyan hour" after a long-running Wesleyan radio program on Sunday afternoons.

Occasionally, we would travel on Sundays, although this was unusual. We could eat out on such trips because "the ox was in the ditch" (Luke 14:5). After I was married, my dad knew that we did not have any convictions against eating out on Sunday. A couple times when Angie prepared a meal for us all on Sunday we kind of felt like my Dad was disappointed that we weren't planning to eat out. After all, why miss an allowed exemption to eat out on Sunday when you can? We chuckled about that. It's like some family members who didn't believe in having a TV but sure seemed to enjoy watching our TV when they came over.

2. I didn't really struggle too much with this set of rules. I did feel bad to miss the television premiere of Star Wars and Star Trek and other movies when they premiered on TV. You see, we weren't allowed to go to movies, so to this day I haven't seen E.T. or other famous movies of my childhood. In my last year of college, it became possible to rent movies and watch them on VHS. I'm still not sure I've seen the first Star Wars all the way through -- or the first Star Trek. An older lady at church loved Star Trek and somehow got a cassette tape of the first movie from the cinema. I listened to that thing a number of times.

Apart from a class trip to see animated Cinderella in the fifth grade (my mother went with me as a chaperone), the first movie I ever saw in a cinema was The Dream Team in 1989. I felt a little uneasy going to the movies then. I think it had been moved to the Special Directions of the Wesleyan Church by then and had become a suggestion not to go rather than a membership requirement. That was a clever political move the denomination made in those days. Rather than get into a direct fight with ultraconservatives over an old tradition, they just put it in the Special Directions section. That way it still felt like it was a requirement without it really being a requirement.

There obviously isn't a verse in the Bible about not going to movies. It was one of our "traditions of the elders" (cf. Mark 7:3). If many conservatives in my background didn't think you should own a TV, they certainly didn't think you should go to movies. I'm sure it was felt that movies depicted lifestyles that were inappropriate. 

Entertainment itself probably smelled of sin to some. After all, it was pleasurable in a self-oriented way. It could involve comedy, and sometimes I fear it was hard for some to distinguish between seriousness and holiness. Some probably thought it a waste of time when you could be doing something helpful or worthwhile. 

I imagine there were even some who weren't sure whether fiction was appropriate for a Christian. Is fiction lying? After all, it is a story that didn't actually happen. Don't tell Jesus that with his parables. A parable is a short fictional story, after all. Upon posing this fact, I've had some people respond, "How do we know the parables weren't real stories?" 

How do we get off into such craziness? Just because a story did not happen in history doesn't mean it's lying or even that it's not true. Good grief. Everyone knows it isn't something that happened in history. No one is deceived! Fictional stories teach us all kinds of truths. The story Nathan the prophet told David wasn't a story that actually happened, but it told a truth so powerfully that David repented. 

4. It's worth remembering that all these debates were our version of the Jewish traditions of the elders. Like good rabbis, holiness folk debated what made you unclean and what didn't. When VCRs came out, I heard that holiness folk debated whether you could have a TV if you didn't watch anything but good videos using a VCR. For example, if you only used the TV to watch Gaither videos, was it ok to have the equipment then? Was the machine intrinsically unclean or did the things you watch on it make it unclean? Sounds a lot like Romans 14.

Sunday meals at camp meetings were a wonderful example of holiness "Mishnah" (the name for the collection of Jewish oral traditions on keeping the Law first written down about AD200). On the one hand, you weren't supposed to buy or sell on Sundays. But you wanted people to drive in from all over to come to Sunday worship. How would they eat if they didn't know anyone with a cabin there?

The solution was a "free will offering." You were allowed to give on Sunday -- it wasn't actually buying a meal or selling one. So a man would sit there and take "donations" (with a suggested amount). Wesleyan guilt did the rest. People gave a donation for their meals that, coincidentally, was what they would otherwise have been charged.

Another important concept I already mentioned was to "abstain from all appearance of evil." This idea came from the King James of 1 Thessalonians 5:22. The verse was taken to mean that you should not do anything that even could be interpreted as doing the wrong thing. For example, if someone sees you go into the cinema, you might be going to see Cinderella, but someone might think you're going in to see something seedy or violent. 

"Abstaining from the appearance of evil" meant not going at all so no one would even think you were going to the movies to watch something bad. The same with owning a TV. You didn't want to tempt yourself to watch something bad, and the very association of the TV with bad things meant you shouldn't have one.

Or if you go into a restaurant that has a bar (like Applebees), someone might think that you are going in to drink even if you aren't (see also 1 Cor. 8:10). Bowling alleys were frowned on because people smoked a lot in there, and they didn't seem like the right kind of people. People might think you were smoking or drinking, so don't go so they don't see an "appearance" of you doing evil. In more recent times, many bowling alleys have become less smokey, and it was interesting to think of my dad going bowling with other people from his church in Lakeland in retirement.

Of course, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 didn't actually mean anything like this. A better translation would be "Stay away from every form of evil." The idea is to abstain from every kind of evil not anything that even looks like it might be evil.

5. In contrast to all the "traditions of the elders" that were part of my holiness background, there actually is a good deal of biblical teaching on the Sabbath. Exodus 20:8-11 told the Israelites to set the Sabbath day apart as holy. What did that mean? It meant not to work on the Sabbath (20:9). No one in your household was supposed to work either (20:10).

Not working on the Sabbath was a big deal in much of the Old Testament. A man gets stoned to death in Numbers 15 for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Nehemiah 10 and 13 give stern commands to Israel not to buy or sell on the Sabbath.

It is fascinating to me that, today, everyone in my Wesleyan circles believes that observing a Sabbath is important but 1) it doesn't necessarily matter which day it is, 2) it is often associated with setting aside a day of worship more than a day of rest (although there has been a "rest" movement in recent decades), and 3) it doesn't usually involve any prohibition on buying or selling. Given how many rules I grew up with around the Sabbath -- and my own struggle through them -- I find these contemporary practices hermeneutically sloppy.

6. First, Sunday is never equated with the Sabbath in Scripture. That is to say, Christians are not keeping the Old Testament Sabbath, the Jewish Sabbath, when we worship or set aside Sunday. The Seventh Day Adventists and Seventh Day Baptists are half right. I have always said that the Seventh Day Adventists are often right about something they observe in the biblical text. They're just wrong in the application. They find minority texts and then go with them instead of the ones the majority of Christians have focused on for two thousand years.

Sunday is the Lord's Day. It is the day that Christians gather together to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Every Sunday is a little Easter. John of Patmos had his vision on the Lord's Day (Rev. 1:10). As far as I can tell, it was a work day in the New Testament. I picture some early Christians meeting at dawn on the Lord's Day, and I picture local assemblies meeting in the evening for a meal together (the Lord's supper, cf. 1 Cor. 11:17-34).

Since the Bible itself never transfers or equates Sunday to the Sabbath, this is an "outside the Bible" interpretation. It is a Puritan development in recent centuries. It is a piece of modern Mishnah, a modern tradition of the elders. The early church fathers did not consider the Jewish Sabbath obligatory (Didache, Justin Martyr) or even rejected it (e.g., Epistle of Barnabas). As we will see, the New Testament did not consider it obligatory either, especially for Gentile believers.

Equating the two reflects a common pattern among Christians where we ascribe something we practice to Scripture when it isn't actually stated in Scripture. It reflects an unreflective of reading of the Bible where we insert our assumptions into the text when the text doesn't state them. We "glue" pieces of the Bible together and say they're the Bible when in fact we are providing the glue from outside the Bible, from our traditions or our minds.

7. So should we follow the Seventh Day Adventists and start meeting on Saturdays, the seventh day of the week? ...

6. What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context
5. Adventures in Hair, Part I

4. So what was 1 Corinthians 11 really about? 

We know that the central problem of the Corinthian church was disunity (1:10). They were divided into various factions. Some of the original believers there might be called the "Paul" group because they were loyal to him and his authority. But there were apparently others who used Apollos as an excuse to disregard Paul's instructions. Apollos had come to disciple the community after Paul and no doubt took slightly different approaches to various issues -- just like your pastors vary a little from one to the next.

Here are some of the lines of disunity at Corinth. Some wealthy individuals apparently got drunk at the Lord's Supper while others went hungry. Some were taking others to court. Some may have wanted to use Jesus as an excuse to divorce. Tongues speakers perhaps thought they were spiritually superior to others who didn't speak in tongues. Some had no problem eating at pagan temples while others found this practice highly problematic. 

Welcome to the church at Corinth!

1 Corinthians 11 arguably has to do with disorderly worship at Corinth, a theme Paul will explore in more detail in chapters 12-14. In chapter 14, Paul sets down rules for the exercise of spiritual gifts. One prophecy at a time. One speaking in tongues at a time but only if there is an interpreter. No more than two or three in a gathering.

5. The situation in chapter 11 relates to the social awkwardness of men and women in close quarters -- especially with wives praying and prophesying in the worship. Remember that they gathered in house churches. We can imagine that this was a sexually tense situation, with men and women together in unusual proximity.

Paul's goal in 1 Corinthians 11, I would argue, is not only to reduce disorder but to reduce the sexual tension by making sure everything is "in its place." Because the dynamics have everything to do with the cultural situation, the specifics don't translate directly to today. What translates to today are 1) removing barriers to worship, including the full participation of women in worship and 2) not creating an environment conducive to adultery.

How does he do this? By making sure that the wives in the assembly wear their hair veils. This would likely have been odd to do in a home -- especially for the matron of the house. But the hair veil served as a kind of wedding ring indicating that a woman was "taken." Additionally, it was an instrument of modesty. 

We've already mentioned that different cultures have different thresholds for sexual attraction. Dresses in the 1800s went nearly to the ground. If a woman in a dress going to the knees had walked around Victorian England, she would have raised lots of eyebrows by showing some leg.

Women's hair was apparently quite enticing in certain Jewish circles of the first century. In the Jewish novel, Joseph and Asenath (dating to the first or second century AD), the widow Asenath begins to wear a hair veil when she remarries Joseph. The veil thus indicated that a woman was married.

In the worship at Corinth, the covering put the situation into order. Now, when a wife prayed or prophesied in worship, her hair veil made her modest in the face of the other husbands in the congregation (not to mention God and the angels, who were putatively male -- you don't want angels lusting after you like they did in the days of Noah). "Keep your eyes to yourself," it said. "I'm married."

The hair veil thus gave authority to the wife to pray and prophesy in the presence of other men and the angels. As a quick sidenote, you'll notice that I am speaking extensively about wives rather than women in general. Unmarried women did not wear the hair veil. The word for women in these passages (including 1 Timothy 2) arguably should be translated wives because women were not normally conceptualized as free agents in the culture like they are today. Most of the women in the congregation would have been "women-as-wived."

6. Let's skim the passage with this background in view. First, Paul assumes that Christ is the head of the man and the man is the head of the woman (11:3). He is affirming the cultural pattern of his day to establish order in worship.

There is some debate over whether "head" (kephale) means authority or source in the New Testament, including here. I am sympathetic to the source argument, and it has some evidence in 11:8 and Ephesians 4:15-16. This idea of the husband as the nourisher and origin of the wife thus has some textual basis.

However, the likelihood that this headship imagery has some background in Aristotle pushes me in the other direction. In Aristotle's Politics 1254b10-20, he sets down a structure for the home VERY reminiscent of Colossians 3:18-4:1 and Ephesians 5:21-6:9. There is thus nothing distinctively Christian about the household structure here. It is exactly what everyone thought. It is only when Paul moves in the direction of the value of the wife, slave, and child that he is being distinctively Christian.

(I might add that in Plato's Republic, the head symbolizes the rulers of society, so we can't argue that the notion of the head as authority was not present in the background.)

So the household structure in this passage is just as cultural as the wearing of hair veils. I sense that many egalitarians -- who have not lived as I have under the implementation of the teaching on hair length -- have a subconscious impulse to try to make as much in this passage directly applicable to today as possible. So while the hair length and covering can be assigned to the cultural domain, there is a hesitancy to recognize that the headship language is cultural as well.

Yet, as I have indicated, this structure comes from Aristotle and Hellenistic culture. You won't find it articulated in the Old Testament. More importantly, it pulls against the spiritual equality that is a fundamental implication of the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17; Gal. 3:28).

Paul is trying to hold both things in tension in 1 Corinthians 11. Women can clearly pray and prophesy in worship -- that's what's driving the instructions in 1 Corinthians 11. Yet this radically new situation of the Spirit is creating some cultural complications too. So Paul reaffirms those cultural patterns so that the Spirit can continue to flow through the wives of the assembly.

7. So a man should not have his head covered (11:4). It needs to be uncovered to reflect Christ. The expression "having against head" hints at what they would have known without having to be told. We are talking about veiling in this passage. Not a face veil as in Muslim culture, but a hair veil like we used to wear during Christmas plays with a towel covering our hair.

In 11:6, Paul pulls out the big guns. If the wife is not going to cover, it's like her shaving her head like disgraced women sometimes are. The audience gasps. No, not that! OK. So put a veil on it.

Our puzzling verse, 11:10 now becomes clear. She is not only engaging the husbands around her when she prays and prophesies. She is engaging the spiritual realm of God and angels too, who are putatively male (for some strange and uncomfortable reading, see Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body). The hair veil "authorizes" her spiritual activity in the presence of all these "males." Its purpose is to enable her to fully participate in the ministry of the church. 

8. I end where this chapter started. By the time I was a boy, most Wesleyans were not too concerned about men and women's hair anymore. In the sixties, some Wesleyan young men had the Beatles cut. And women were at least cutting their hair to shoulder length. Our tradition never wore prayer bonnets like the Quakers and others.

Nevertheless, in my corner of the Wesleyan world, some of these verses in 1 Corinthians 11 were like memory verses. "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her" (11:15). "If a woman be not covered, let her also be shorn" (11:6). "Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him" (11:14).

Most Christians at the time basically ignored verses like these. They "deselected" them in their paradigms without much thought. But as someone with a hyperactive conscience, I needed a basis not to see them as binding on men and women today. The basis was the discovery of context. "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose."

A bun doesn't have any meaning today. A hair veil not only has no meaning today -- it would actually be somewhat offputting. Far from saying, "Everything is in order here," it would create unnecessary distance with those we want to lead to Christ. Ironically, a wedding ring performs much of the same function as the hair veil today.

Context is everything. That was a lesson I was only beginning to learn in my late college/early seminary years.

5. Adventures in Hair

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry
4. Beginnings of Context

___________________ 
1. I've mentioned questions about hair in our journey so far. In the circles of my childhood, women were to have long hair, and men were to have short hair. By the time I was born, most Wesleyan women did not have buns. But many still did in my corner of the Wesleyan world. I never heard terms like "Wesleyan wads" or "Methodist buns" until seminary, but those are playful descriptions I heard later.

My three oldest sisters sang in a "Schenck Trio." They were once canceled from singing in a service when it was discovered they had bangs -- with some hair cut around their ears. In the 1960s, some of them had shoulder-length hair. That was quite liberal for some of the holiness circles we swam in. 

When one of my aunts cut her hair short, I remember hearing the comment that she had "backed up on light." It was one thing not to know any better, the thought went. But it was really bad if you had once known what you were supposed to do and then violated the rules. It was seen as defiance against God -- a threat to one's eternal destiny.

2. So where did these hair standards come from? To be honest, I think the real driving forces were resistance to cultural change. Jonathan Haidt has suggested that, in a typical society, the majority is resistant to change. Their middle name is "friction," and they like to perpetuate the status quo ("We've always done things this way"). 

On the other hand, there is also a minority in society that is more innovative by nature. They like change. They like to try new things. So, the majority in a culture are often suspicious of change while others love to explore new possibilities. If you haven't seen the animated movie, The Croods, it's worth a watch.

Haidt's idea is that it helps a society survive if, while most people are wired for stability, a strategic few are wired to be explorers.

Hairstyles and women's dress started to change significantly in the mid-twentieth century. After World War II, women were increasingly empowered and entering the workplace. And a lot of men (and women) didn't like it. It's only natural that they would seek a divine basis to decry such changes. It's a predictable pattern. Use God to give a divine imprimatur to your resistance to societal change. God doesn't want you to change your hair. God doesn't want you to wear pants or slacks.

So, I suspect thus that the move against women having shorter hair or wearing pants had as much to do with resistance to social change as anything else. It's basic sociology. Nevertheless, there were passages in the Bible that were used to say that God opposed these changes, namely, 1 Corinthians 11.

3. I think for most Christians, 1 Corinthians 11 is a somewhat obscure passage in the Bible. Many Christians read it and think, "What is THAT all about?" It is beginning to get a little more play right now because husband headship in the family is becoming a more common discussion. But for most of my life -- except for my holiness circles -- this was one of those chapters that few "selected" in their paradigms as central for today.

Take 1 Corinthians 11:10: "A wife ought to have authority on her head because of the angels." Whaaat? I used to tell my students that if a verse seems crazy weird like this, they've probably hit a point of great cultural difference between our time and that time. Another example is when Jacob puts speckled rods in front of mating sheep when they are procreating so that they will have speckled offspring. Whaat?

Some will want me to note quickly that these are not always instances where an ancient perspective is in place. They could also be instances where our culture is blind to some value that we should pay attention to. In other words, we must keep in mind that a verse may seem strange because our culture is so off track. This possibility must certainly be kept in mind.

However, we need to understand the passage first clearly before we can evaluate any cultural difference. To do so, we must get our heads around the paradigms and worldviews of the biblical worlds. It means knowing the historical and cultural contexts of the Bible. 

The biblical text alone will only take us so far on that journey. Why? Because this sort of context is often not explicit in the text. Far more often, it is assumed. It was the water in which the biblical authors and audiences swam. 

They did not need to spell out the cultural context because it was thoroughly assumed. When my mother wrote me letters, she didn't have to explain to me that she had given me birth and that I had grown up with her. We both knew all that. In the same way, the most foundational assumptions of a letter like 1 Corinthians did not need to be spelled out because they knew them thoroughly. Indeed, they were likely unaware of their own cultural assumptions to a large extent.

I've told my students for years that what we get in Paul's letters is "clean up on isle six." The most core and central themes of Christianity (like the cross) were matters he would have covered in person when he founded churches. In his letters, we are getting instructions on the more peripheral issues that arose in his absence. When I teach 1 Corinthians, I always say how sorry I am for them for being so messed up. But I am delighted they had so many problems for our benefit. Think of all the things we wouldn't know about the earliest church if the Corinthians had not been so messed up!

Paul says in this passage, "Does not even nature itself teach you that if a husband has long hair, it is a dishonor to him?" (1 Cor. 11:14). I'm sure that most of his audience probably resonated with this statement. I frankly find it puzzling. Mind you, I grew up in holiness culture. I have an intuitively negative reaction to men with long hair. I just don't see how nature indicates that its dishonorable. The word nature here seems to mean something more like culture or custom.

Paul is clearly tapping into the worldview of his first-century culture here. I have never been able to figure out any natural argument for men having short hair or against long hair on men. His statement amounts to something like, "Everybody knows that it's dishonorable for a husband to have long hair."

4. So what was 1 Corinthians 11 really about? ...

4. The Beginnings of Context

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach
2. Adventures in Interpretation
3. Adventures in Jewelry

___________________
8. I have been sharing some personal and relational pieces of my journey with holiness standards. But of course, there were verses that went along with these beliefs about how to dress and present your hair. I've already mentioned several of them. 

For example, 1 Timothy 2:9-10 says, "Likewise also, I wish wives to adorn themselves in proper clothing with modesty and discretion, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garment." 1 Peter 3:3 similarly says, "Wives, don't let your outward adornment be the braiding of hairs or wearing of gold or wearing of garments."

I grew up treating these as timeless individual commands. I did not think to ask what these verses meant in the first century or even in the situations of these letters. The words applied directly to you and me -- and I read the look of our jewelry and our hairstyles into the words. 

The question of the original context -- what the hairstyles were like in the first century, what jewelry was like in the first century -- I didn't even think to ask that question. It never occurred to us that the specifics of a verse might have a lot to do with that time without being for all time in its particulars. After all, why would God have put it in the Bible then?

9. In 2005, I was privileged to go with Wilbur Williams to Israel. In the group was an engaged couple. In fact, Wilbur did an unofficial wedding for them at Cana in Galilee. While we were in the Old City of Jerusalem, she wanted pizza, and he wanted a gyro. So while she went into the pizza place for a slice of cheese pizza, he went across the alley to get the gyro.

A funny thing then happened when he returned to the pizza place with his gyro, wanting to eat with her. He was immediately shooed out of the restaurant. Why? Because of Exodus 23:19: "You will not boil a baby goat in its mother's milk." What?

What does this have to do with pizza and gyros? Well, Jewish tradition associates the milk with dairy and the baby goat with meat. So the rabbinic tradition did not allow a person to eat meat and cheese in the same meal. Thus, no meat on your pizza for a Jew who follows kosher dietary rules.

The way Jews observe this commandment today has nothing to do with its original purpose. In fact, we don't really know what the purpose of this command in the Law was. Its original meaning is locked up in the ancient past, lost to history, and we simply do not have any ancient evidence to tell us what it was about. I have a hunch that it had something to do with a Canaanite religious practice. But we just don't know. 

(As a side note, you hear a lot of chatter out there from people claiming to know the real meaning behind many biblical mysteries. Nine times out of ten, these ancient secrets have no historical basis. The "secret knowledge" these influencers give rarely has any basis in historical evidence. For example, there was no gate to Jerusalem called the "eye of a needle." The high priest did not wear a bell or rope when he went into the Most Holy Place so they could pull him out if there was a problem. These legends are completely made up.

(Alternatively, some people wrongly assume that all the practices in the Mishnah (AD200) or the Talmud (400s and 500s) go back to the time of Jesus. But Judaism changed dramatically after Jerusalem was destroyed in AD70 and then even more after the Bar Kochba revolt was squashed in AD135. For example, the seder meal many Christians celebrate today probably wasn't fully developed at the time of Christ. We love these traditions when we hear about them because they make us feel like we have secret knowledge and are right there with Jesus. But many of them are anachronistic. 

(If you are a real truth-seeker, get used to the answer, "We just don't know.")

10. When I wrote my New Testament Survey textbook, I wrote the following bottom line: "Doing what they did isn't doing what they did if it doesn't accomplish the same purpose." In other words, greeting the brothers with a holy kiss today (1 Thess. 5:26) doesn't "do" the same thing as greeting someone with a holy kiss in the first century in Paul's churches. 

This is such an important realization. Someone might say, "Ken, you're disobeying the Bible because you don't greet people at College Wesleyan Church with a kiss." My response is that the connotations of a kiss at College Wesleyan would be dramatically different than a kiss in the church of ancient Thessalonica. Doing what they did wouldn't be doing what they did!

Even more, what kind of a kiss would you have me give? A kiss on the lips? That might be what the verse appears to say when I come to it with the "dictionary" in my head. You say kiss; I think lips. But what if their kiss was a friendly kiss on the cheek like they do in France sometimes?

We are getting to the heart of how meaning works. The pre-modern, pre-reflective thinker 1) assumes that meaning is inherent in words, things, and actions and 2) doesn't realize a different mind might see a different meaning in those entities. When we first encounter someone with a different interpretation, our natural inclination is to think they are ignorant or evil.

This is the benefit of cross-cultural experiences. Ideally, we get to know ourselves and have our unexamined assumptions unveiled to us. (Of course, many a person on a mission trip in the past has simply come away thinking that those "poor people" are stupid. This would be a failed trip that has only reinforced ignorance on the part of the goer.)

11. I would eventually come to realize that meaning is not inherent in words, objects, or actions. Paul alludes to this principle in Romans 14:14: "Nothing is impure in itself. It is impure for the person who thinks it is impure." On its face, this is a quite radical statement and there are currently debates over the exact meaning of "impure" here and what the scope of the comment was.

However, Romans 14 would play heavily into the development of my understanding in those years of late college and early seminary. It shifted my focus from actions themselves -- Sabbath observance, clothing -- to the intentions behind the actions. Indeed, the final verse of this chapter gives great insight into the very nature of sin, "Everything that does not proceed from faith is sin." In other words, sin is a matter of one's heart far more than one's action.

I heard a story once that I have been unable to verify. I originally heard it in the context of a military person in Africa during World War II. Perhaps it is instead a missionary story. Or perhaps it is a completely made-up legend. Nevertheless, I have found it a helpful thought experiment in the meaning of actions.

In the story, a famous military general was going to be passing by a crowd of Africans. However, the African women in this particular context did not normally cover their breasts. So, they were told to be sure to cover their breasts as the VIP drove by. Accordingly, as the general's jeep passed by, the women lifted their skirts to cover their breasts -- in the process revealing something else.

The reason I find this story helpful is because it demonstrates that the significance of both breasts and privates is not entirely intrinsic to them as objects themselves. To be sure, such things have global functions. When every instance of something on the planet functions a certain way, there are bound to be overlapping connotations that appear intrinsic and appear universal. 

However, a child might not infer them, and an alien from Mars might not. In that sense, the meaning still is not intrinsic. The meaning only appears universal because each individual instance has that connotation -- not because the action has that universal meaning inherent in it. Meaning in such cases adds up to being universal. It is not universal because it has that meaning in itself.

When I was a teenager, it would have been difficult for me to believe that breasts are not always highly sexual because they certainly are for me. But I have been convinced that, at least in the past in Africa, a woman's breasts were not sexualized in the way they are in my culture and certainly not as sexualized as they are in many Middle Eastern countries. Both on my honeymoon in Greece and on a family vacation years ago in France, my wife and I had occasion to observe some middle-aged topless bathers. Although it was a little shocking, there was nothing particularly sexual about those instances.

What is my point? My point is that the significance of jewelry and adornment has everything to do with 1) cultural norms and 2) internal attitudes. As I said earlier, a person can be arrogant about their plainness. A person can press the limits of how showy their hair bun is and yet officially be following the rules. Or a woman might wear a fair amount of jewelry and think almost nothing about it. 

1 Peter 3:4 instructs that a woman's adornment be her "hidden person in the heart." This is the key to the keeping of verses like these. "Doing what they did" is not so much about the specifics of jewelry as about the attitude of the heart. Of course, someone might take it to the next level and ask whether the focus on pride itself is cultural, but I don't wish to go there.

What kinds of jewelry and hairstyles did 1 Peter and 1 Timothy have in mind? Here is an example of a Flavian hairstyle. The Flavians were slightly after Peter and Paul's lifetime, but it could give us a hint of what a showy hairstyle might have looked like in the late first century. Ironically, it is not entirely unreminiscent of the "Wesleyan wads" I grew up with, with a little more panache.

12. If we desire to listen to the Bible on its own terms, it tells us that it was written to Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and so forth. This is what it says. It is hard to see how -- if we really consider Scripture to be the authority -- we can get around this most basic of conclusions. 1) The Bible tells us that it was written to people who have been dead for 2000-3000 years.

Now here's the second realization, one that some may want to debate more. It will feature over and over again as we go on this journey. 2) Meaning is contextual. What words meant to the audiences of the Bible was a function of their world. We cannot fully capture the meaning in English because our English words are a function of meaning in our world -- our words presuppose certain features of our world that did not exist or were different in the ancient worlds. Our words presuppose elements of our worldview, just as their words presupposed elements of their worldview.

This is also true about actions. Doing certain things in their world had different connotations than doing those things in our world and vice versa. That means that simply doing what they did today isn't always going to be "doing what they did."

What's the conclusion? The conclusion is that reading the Bible in context is like an intercultural experience. We are "reading someone else's mail" at least in the first instance. There is a meaning gap between us and them that is in play whether we realize it or not. 

I see no way around this conclusion. As so many have said, the Bible is for us but it was not written to us. To respond, "It's written equally to everyone" reflects a lack of understanding of how meaning works. Feel free to doubt me. In late college, my understanding of such things was only beginning and was very uneven. I have to think that, if you hang with me in the pages that follow, you will be more than convinced in the end.

13. For those who did not grow up in a context that was so out of the mainstream, it is possible to go a long time -- maybe even your whole life -- not recognizing or encountering the distance between ourselves today and the text. I heard a pastor not too long ago poo-pooing any sense that we should not simply read the text and do what it says.

However, his claim would not stand up to any close examination. Does his wife stay in seclusion for seven days during her periods (Lev. 15:19)? Like any paradigm, he selects certain verses that are deemed important and "deselects" others that are not considered as directly relevant. This all seems like common sense to him, but it is a function of his sub-culture. Some other group would select a different set of verses and deselect others. 

All of this is done fairly unreflectively, pre-modernly. In my final year of college, I was just beginning to understand that "context is everything" when it comes to meaning. And our context today is quite different from the context of the ancient world. It just undeniably is.

In Greek in college, Dr. Dongell gave us a quote from Melanchthon in the 1500s. He was the main systematizer and interpreter of Martin Luther's theology for the Lutheran tradition. I wrote it in my first Greek New Testament. It was something like, "Theology is merely the application of the rules of grammar to the biblical text." Although Melanchthon was brilliant, he was completely wrong here. A couple years later, when I was in seminary, I wrote under that quote the much more accurate statement, "Context is everything."