Tag Archives: Biblical interpretation

Inspiration, inerrancy, infallibility

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As much as I hate to validate a tangent, the comment thread from yesterday touched on something important. Interestingly enough, Patrick Mead has been writing on the same subject: how should we understand inspiration?

Patrick explains in yesterday’s post:

When I was a boy and up until I was in my late 20s I only heard one version of how we got our Bibles. I was told that every single word came directly from the mouth of God (via the Holy Spirit). There was no input from the human writers. They were merely stenographers for the Spirit. As an illustration of this my father and other ministers would bring up the story of Balaam’s donkey. “God didn’t just give that donkey an idea and let him express it in his own words” they would say. And they said that the exact same mechanism was involved in writing the Bibles – Jeremiah, Peter, Paul, and Amos all wrote down what they were told to write, word for word.

I have talked with many people who think that the Bible was dictated, word for word, by the Holy Spirit. Any perceived humanness is the Spirit’s attempt to make the Bible more understandable, they say.

Patrick does a good job of reminding us that this view of the Bible arose with fundamentalism in the 19th century. It is a child of modernism, an attempt to make the Bible fit the scientific method.

So what do we expect of this holy book? If it is inspired, what does that mean? Terms get tossed around like inerrancy and literality. Patrick describes the Chicago Statement on inerrancy:

It says, in part, “Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individuals’ lives.” It goes on to state that the Bible’s words came directly from God and are, therefore, completely moral and without error in everything it affirms – historically, scientifically, and theologically.

Is that what inspired means? Does every detail in the Bible have to be correct for the Bible to be inspired? I have some thoughts on the subject, but I’d like to hear yours. How much room for “human error” is there in the text of the Bible?

Misrepresenting the Bible (2)

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Yesterday we had an interesting discussion based on some thoughts about people quoting biblical interpretations as if they were biblical quotes. Once we are one step removed from the text, we use that interpretation as a launching point for new interpretations.

  • “Since the Bible says the Old Testament was nailed to the cross, we know that…”
  • “Given that the Bible says Christians must obey all laws, then…”
  • “Seeing that the Bible has commanded us to take up a collection every Sunday…”

Maybe part of the solution is what we talked about last week, spending more time reading God’s Word and less time expounding on it. We’ve got to get back to the original starting point… even if we end up at the same place!

  • “Colossians says that the written code that was against us was nailed to the cross. I think that’s talking about the Old Testament, so…”
  • “Paul talks about submitting to the authorities. Part of how we do that is by obeying the laws those authorities create. Therefore…”
  • “Paul talked to the Corinthians about setting aside money each week as a collection for the church in Jerusalem. This would seem to mean that we should also have an offering each week. That’s why…”

As Travis pointed out, this would seem a bit wishy washy to some. People want the preacher to speak with authority. I disagree with them. I want God’s Word to speak with authority. I will do my best to help people understand what that authoritative word has to say, but I want them to be aware that I am a fallible expositor of that word. (None of my regular readers needs to be reminded of that!)

Do you have better suggestions? How can we avoid imposing our interpretations on the text itself?

Misrepresenting the Bible

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I think we should be very careful when we say, “The Bible teaches…” or “the Bible says…” I guess the second of those especially requires special handling. When we say such things, we need to be able to point to direct textual affirmations of what we’re saying.

Here are some times I’ve heard people misuse these phrases:

  • Years ago, in a meeting with other church leaders, one very good student of the Bible said, “The Bible says the man is to make the decisions in the family.” When pressed on the point, he referred to the passages that speak of male headship. What he should have said is, “The Bible says the man is the head of the woman, which I understand to mean that the man makes the decisions.” I don’t agree with his interpretation, but at least the statement would be accurate.
  • In another meeting, during a heated discussion, one young member referenced the Psalms to support his point. As soon as the young man mentioned the Psalms, the preacher interrupted and said, “My Bible says that’s been nailed to the cross.” Were it possible to be sued for textual malpractice, this man would have lost his preaching license.
  • Taking their cues from Romans 13, I’ve heard Christians say, “The Bible teaches that we are to be good citizens,” and “The Bible says that Christians are to obey all laws (unless they contradict God’s law).” Both of those affirmations are based on an interpretation of “Submit to the authorities” and “Honor the King.” They need to be acknowledged as such.
  • One person who participated a few years ago in our discussion about alcohol contacted me on Facebook to discuss the subject a bit further. He made the statement, “My own personal rule or standard is that if I drank anything strong enough to make me drunk it would violate the prohibition against strong drink.” Unless he’s found some new passage that I’ve never heard of, the “prohibition” he’s referring to comes from Proverbs 20:1. Rather than open the whole discussion again, I merely told him: “As we’ve seen before, we have differing views on whether or not God prohibited strong drink.” But it was a bit discouraging to see him continue to tout advice from wisdom literature as a biblical prohibition.

All of that to say, I’m trying to do better at owning my own interpretations. There is a difference between what God’s Word says and the conclusions I draw based on what is said. If I don’t learn to discern between the two, it will be hard for me to learn much of anything.

 

Photo courtesy of Creation Swap

Narrative theology

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Besides learning how to read stories, we need to consider viewing the Bible as a story, with us as participants. I’m sure that others of you have spent more time with “narrative theology”; it’s somewhat new to me. Much of it reminds me of what Tom Olbricht taught so many of us about theology being the story of the mighty acts of God. I think narrative theology builds on that idea, looking at how we fit into that story.

Apparently, Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture moved a lot of people to think about narrative theology. At least it sparked a lot of discussion on the subject.

One blogger who sought to summarize narrative theology is Roger Olson. He boiled his thoughts down to these points:

  1. Narrative theology focuses on the Bible as a dramatic account of God’s activity.
  2. Narrative theology acknowledges that the Bible contains propositions, but it says biblical propositions are not independent of or superior to the metanarrative of God’s saving activity.
  3. A biblical proposition is “God is love” (1 John 4:8), but it needs interpretation. The only way to interpret “God is love” is to look at the biblical story that reveals God’s character through his actions.
  4. According to narrative theology, the Bible contains many kinds of statements—commands, propositions, expressions of praise, prayers, poetry, prophecies, parables, etc. All must be interpreted in light of the great story of God and its purpose—to reveal the character of God through his mighty acts leading up to and centering around Jesus Christ.
  5. Theology is our best human attempt to understand the biblical drama-story. But a theologian cannot do that properly unless he or she is “living the story” together with a community of faith shaped by the story.
  6. Doctrines are secondary to the story. They are judged by their ability to draw out and express faithfully the character of God as revealed by the story.
  7. The task of the church is to “faithfully improvise” the “rest of the story.” Christians first must be grounded in the story. Second, they must together (communally) improvise the “rest of the story” faithfully to the story given in the Bible.
  8. The alternatives are to either a) regard the Bible as a grab bag of propositions to be pulled out to answer questions, or b) regard the Bible as a not-yet-systematized system of theology (like a philosophy). Both alternatives fail to do justice to what the Bible really is—a grand drama of God’s mighty saving acts that progressively reveals his character culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

I want to explore that some more next week, but for now, let’s hear your thoughts and critiques.

Reading stories

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I’ll be the first to admit it: having a Master’s in Communication doesn’t always make you a good communicator. Somehow what I wrote yesterday came across as a rant against preachers and preaching.

What I’m trying to say is that we often don’t know how to read narratives. [Jeff Hobbs made some interesting points (here and on Facebook) about everything being narrative, but let’s leave that for another discussion] We take a story and make the incidentals into the main points. It’s like reading Don Quijote to learn about how to use windmills or reading Moby Dick to study boat building.

Too often, we try to make narratives a part of a system of laws. In the Wright quote yesterday, he talked about turning the gospels into epistles. To do that, we have to create teaching points, “timeless truths” that we can pull out of every story.

In my experience, we’ve done that more with the book of Acts, since the gospels don’t really count. (Yes, that is sarcasm) We read Acts 20:1-12 and come away with lessons about the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, debates about whether the passage describes one meal or two, etc. Is that even close to what Luke was talking about? Acts 20 tells us the story of a man raised from the dead, and we’re focused on the meals surrounding that act?

In fact, most churches thoroughly enjoy studying Acts, up until about chapter 14. Then it starts to drag, because it becomes harder and harder to pick apart the stories. Part of the problem is that we really need to read the stories of Paul’s journeys all in one sitting to get the feel for them. More than stories, it’s one story, with different episodes. Those episodes find their meaning as part of the whole.

So how do we let narratives tell their own story? How do we keep the Bible stories within the framework of the bigger picture… and the really big picture? I’m at that point where I can see what not to do and haven’t yet come to what should be done. Guidance would be appreciated.