What you read in your current Bible is an English translation of a nearly identical text that was read at the end of the first century. For the Old Testament, a great affirmation of this truth came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – scrolls of biblical text 2,000 years old that are nearly identical to what we have in our Bibles called the Old Testament. More copies of the New Testament writings circulated – by far – than any other ancient text, which increases our confidence in its reliability.
Some people simply stop at that point and place their full faith and trust in the Bible – it’s the reliable Word of God.
But what do we mean when we say Word of God? According to a 2007 Gallup poll, roughly 31% of Americans believe that the Bible is literally the Word of God, meaning that it is either infallible (divinely dictated and therefore incapable of error) or inerrant (divinely given and not including errors). In other words, the text is black and white – what it says is what God meant to say. For 47% of Americans, the Bible is inspired (God- or Spirit-assisted and human-written and therefore trustworthy). In other words, while God is part of the equation, the human element is quite evident and significant. The remaining 19% see the Bible as a human collection of fables, legends, and history. What do you think?
Perhaps it doesn’t really matter much if all we do is read the Bible devotionally, asking God to inspire us in some way, or if we simply read the Bible as literature. But if we are going to claim the Bible as some sort of authority in our lives and for how we practice our faith, how should we proceed interpreting such an ancient text?
Whatever view seems closest to your own, there is a process we all must go through if we really want to understand the Bible’s timeless principles. The process is directly related to our hermeneutic – a fancy word that refers to the way we think about the Bible in an academically critical way. Not critical as in mean and nit-picky, but as in thoughtful and careful. When we read a text, what series of questions do we ask ourselves as we consider what the text says about God, ourselves, and how we might want to live?
The good news: there are some texts that require very little work. Jesus’ parable of The Good Samaritan, for instance, has a pretty easy take-home lesson: care for the person who needs it even if it costs you time and money and may come with risk. In short, love. But even that black and white text comes to life in living color when we learn more about the characters involved, the geographical setting, the audience Jesus addressed and the religious culture of Jesus’ day. But the good news is that there are plenty of scriptures that have easy lessons to teach – so read the thing and learn how it instructs your faith and life.
For many texts, however, we need to do some homework. We must realize that the Bible was not written in our time, and was not written with us in mind. The worldview of our ancestors is not like ours. The way they thought about their physical world, gods, ethnicity, gender, status could not be more different than that held by the majority of us in the Western world living today. Certain of this, we must then be careful to keep this in mind when we engage a text.
By the way, it doesn’t matter how you view God’s role in the Bible’s authorship. Even if God dictated every jot and tittle, we must still work to understand what the text meant for the original audience, since it was written for an intended audience. Especially if you hold the inerrant or infallible view, this is important. Otherwise, the God who authored the Bible is an uninformed fool who, though claiming responsibility for creating the earth, described it not as a sphere orbiting the sun but more like a snow globe at the center of the universe around which everything else revolved. But you wouldn’t know that that was an issue unless you did some homework. That’s why it’s important – don’t do your homework and you may end up looking and sounding like an absolute fool.
Discovering what the ancients thought is critical, and leads naturally to a next step: once we know what the text was about and what the take-home points might be, we need to ask what the dynamic equivalent is for us. For instance, the Apostle Paul instructed early Christians regarding eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some of the early Christians thought that eating the meat was an act of idolatry, since the animals were offered as sacrifice to foreign gods. Other Christians, including Paul, didn’t see a problem with eating the meat as an idolatry issue, because they didn’t believe any other gods existed except the One True God proclaimed by Christ. Yet Paul advised those carnivorous Christians to not eat the meat in the presence of those who struggled, since it became a stumbling block for those weaker in the faith. All this talk about meat may make a Napan start wondering which type of wine is best paired with sacrificed meat…
There is nothing sinful about drinking wine in moderation. Jesus did, for crying out loud! Growing up in a Baptist family, however, such behavior was so frowned upon that it was sin for us. Even though I like a good glass of wine – and since I’ve lived in the Wine Country I now know one when I have one! – there are some people who would stumble if I had a glass of wine with them over dinner. It is not sin to drink wine. But knowing it will make my dinner companions uncomfortable and drinking in front of them anyway is an act of self-centered uncaring, which I believe is a culpable disturbance of shalom – a pretty good definition of the word sin. The wine can wait for another meal with different companions… So, we learn context, understand original application, and apply the principle forward. If we hadn’t done this, the issue would be left as an unhelpful reference, only to apply to our lives in the event we were faced with the temptation to eat sacrificed meat!
This practice was carried out by ancient Rabbis. Sometimes they would encounter a text that they could not apply to a current situation. So, naturally, they tabled it! They pushed it aside – ignored it – until such a time when clarity gave them insight. To do the same would be to embrace the time-honored tradition of shoulder-shrugging. Sometimes I think we are too quick to jump to conclusions – and other times much too slow – when we should probably enlist the holy shoulder shrug and admit that we don’t have clarity on some texts and some issues. Some texts seem so entrenched in their original context that it is really difficult to glean a decent contemporary application. Some issues are more complex than meets the eye, requiring a lot more thinking than a quick application, and a good amount of public shoulder shrugging and confessing that sometimes we don’t know the mind of God, but we do know we are supposed to love, so we choose that.
The Church has muddled too slowly and emotionally with issues that require deep thought. The result has been that the thinking culture has increasingly written the Church off as a source for critical thinking. Slow on women’s rights. Slow on responding to the racial divide. Slow on gracefully responding to the pain of divorce. Slow on anything and everything dealing with human sexuality. Slow on dealing thoughtfully on immigration issues. Slow on championing peace when the country was faced with war. Slow to forgive some politicians, too quick to embrace others based on party colors. Slow, I think, because it may be afraid that if we go against the face value of the Bible, the world may wonder if we should take the Bible seriously at all. What the Church doesn’t realize, however, is that we don’t take the whole thing seriously already – just the parts we champion during certain seasons. Know any men who shave? Any women with short hair wearing makeup and jewelry? I rest my case. The world has moved much more quickly on its own, and hasn’t known to miss us.
That has to change.
The Bible isn’t any less of a resource than it was for the ancients. God is still God. We need devotees of both to take both seriously, thoughtfully, and passionately, living out the truth they find and making a case for the Bible’s principles in a way that wins fans instead of using the “it’s God’s Word so it must be true” trump card. People’s lives are in the balance right now. The grace of God being communicated to people who desperately need it is at stake. Will you answer the call to honor the Bible for what it is and can be?
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