Thursday, June 23, 2005
Reading and Understanding Scripture
Jollyblogger has a great piece on new schools of scriptural interpretation. David does a excellent job in oh so many ways in the post. I especially like this little bit:
I have always had trouble with the idea that scriptural interpretation is so changeable. God after all is most decidedly unchangeable. God also has, I have to believe, been working through theologians and thinkers for the last 200 centuries, somehow guiding them.
I first really began wondering about this about 7 years ago when I was teaching a class on I Timothy and we came to the passages about the role of women in the church. Needless to say, a strict interpretation is not too popular in this day and age, and particularly not in a PCUSA church. A few years before, I had heard a pastor say that in essence, "the passage says something entirely different than what is actually says -- based on recent archeological finds." I really struggled with that.
There are a couple of things that kept running through my mind. Firstly, if God is truly active in His church, then why would He allow centuries of misinterpretation to lie unchallenged? Secondly, it seems to me that if we believe scripture to be the inspired Word of God, then God should have supplied us with sufficient context within the document itself to avoid at least gross misinterpretation. In other words, if we come to understand scripture based on other information sources, then either scripture is not all we think it is, or those other sources a whole lot more than we think they are.
25 years ago, I taught another Sunday School class on covenant theology and when we were looking at the Pentateuch as background, I brought up the 4-source critical theory, in retrospect just to look smart (ah, youth). Anyway, as is typically the case, that raised all sorts of gasps from people that had never heard about textual criticism before. One man, that I think was older than Methuselah, stood up and said, rather emphatically, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that's that!" Well, so much for reasoned discussion in that class.
I realize that I am sounding a little like that guy in this post, and I am not entirely comfortable with that position, but that said, sometimes, I just think we think too hard. There is a balance between the scholarly and the blindly faithful when it comes to reading and understanding the Bible. I have yet to find that balance, but I think it is very important to always bear in mind that the balance is there somewhere.
But having said that, theologians and interpreters for centuries have believed that the bible had a unifying theme, whether it be the theme of redemption, the kingdom of God, or simply a Christological theme. Systematic theologians studied this theme and other associated themes from a topical standpoint, and in more recent years, those in the biblical theology movement like Vos and Ridderbos have studied the theme of redemption from a historical perspective.I realize that what I am about to say is going to make me sound like a bit of a dummy, but I'm dealing from the heart here, not necessarily the intellect.
And throughout the centuries these scholars have used the tools at their disposal. I think it is safe to grant that though the reformers used a variety of tools, they probably gave greater weight to some of the more philosophical tools of study. Today, folks like Sanders and Wright make greater use of historical-critical tools. We may argue over which tools are better, but I think it is safe to say that all of these tools come from schools of thought which have built in presuppositions.
Getting back to the point though, I would encourage advocates of the New Perspective to be careful about discarding the insights of the past.
I have always had trouble with the idea that scriptural interpretation is so changeable. God after all is most decidedly unchangeable. God also has, I have to believe, been working through theologians and thinkers for the last 200 centuries, somehow guiding them.
I first really began wondering about this about 7 years ago when I was teaching a class on I Timothy and we came to the passages about the role of women in the church. Needless to say, a strict interpretation is not too popular in this day and age, and particularly not in a PCUSA church. A few years before, I had heard a pastor say that in essence, "the passage says something entirely different than what is actually says -- based on recent archeological finds." I really struggled with that.
There are a couple of things that kept running through my mind. Firstly, if God is truly active in His church, then why would He allow centuries of misinterpretation to lie unchallenged? Secondly, it seems to me that if we believe scripture to be the inspired Word of God, then God should have supplied us with sufficient context within the document itself to avoid at least gross misinterpretation. In other words, if we come to understand scripture based on other information sources, then either scripture is not all we think it is, or those other sources a whole lot more than we think they are.
25 years ago, I taught another Sunday School class on covenant theology and when we were looking at the Pentateuch as background, I brought up the 4-source critical theory, in retrospect just to look smart (ah, youth). Anyway, as is typically the case, that raised all sorts of gasps from people that had never heard about textual criticism before. One man, that I think was older than Methuselah, stood up and said, rather emphatically, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that's that!" Well, so much for reasoned discussion in that class.
I realize that I am sounding a little like that guy in this post, and I am not entirely comfortable with that position, but that said, sometimes, I just think we think too hard. There is a balance between the scholarly and the blindly faithful when it comes to reading and understanding the Bible. I have yet to find that balance, but I think it is very important to always bear in mind that the balance is there somewhere.
