Thinking-Christianly

Sometimes enthusiasm can cloud good judgment. It’s wonderful to celebrate the ways in which God encourages, affirms, and empowers those who dare to walk with him. But if we’re not careful that celebration can distort the way we read scripture. We can turn a clear promise of God into an extreme triumphalism that the text does not warrant.

For example, take the statement of Paul to the Philippians when he writes, “I can do all things, through Christ who strengthens me.” (See Philippians 4:13.) Christ-followers occasionally use this statement as “You CAN do it” mantra. Are you experiencing a difficult time in your marriage? Remember Philippians 4:13. Is money tight? Remember Philippians 4:13. Did you fall from your bike and break your forearm? Remember Philippians 4:13.

The words of scripture were not designed to function as a magic elixir to deal with the challenges of life. The prescription is not to swallow a phrase and feel better in the morning.

What does this verse state in context? The word everything is not unqualified. It’s not a promise that we can reverse the body damage in an auto accident, grow a missing finger, or change the outcome of an election after the votes have been counted. Paul is not arguing that we have the capacity as children of God to reorder the universe or erase all the consequences of evil moral choices. When you look at verses 10-12, you discover that Paul has been discussing living in various states of poverty and affluence. He is talking about how he has found contentment with God despite the circumstances that God has sovereignly surrounded him with. The do
everything in this context is the same as “be content in every kind of circumstance.” He is confessing that God will strengthen him to face any kind of circumstance with an attitude that is God-honoring and strengthened by God himself.

In a similar way, God does not promise to give us supernatural power to achieve the goals we strive for. He does give us strength to face whatever circumstances come our way and find contentment in him and his guidance. He is sufficient for every circumstance because he is sovereign over all of them and loving toward his children.

It is wise for growing Christians to use many of the excellent English language tools we have to better understand the Bible. With the help of concordances and dictionaries you can dig into the meaning of Hebrew and Greek words and learn more about what the language meant to the original readers of the scripture.

We can have fun pulling words apart and digging for their original meanings, but what may seem an obvious conclusion can be wrong. The Greek language endured over a long time, and changed through the centuries, as has English. And there were differences between the way words were used in classical and Koine (common) Greek.

One caution we must observe is jumping to conclusions about how a word derives its meaning from earlier words. Even scholars can do this. D.A. Carson notes that the word for servant in 1 Corinthians 4:1 was mistakenly associated with a root meaning “a rower” by many notable scholars. The connection was suggested by one scholar, and uncritically accepted and enlarged upon by others. It became part of the understanding of the word without any corroborating support. (See Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies, p. 29.)

Being dogmatic about words by examining their presumed roots may lead to flawed conclusions. In English, for example, consider a fruit fly. The “fly” accurately describes it as an insect with wings. But what about “fruit”? Does it eat fruit? Does it look like fruit? Is it attracted to fruit? The connection is not clear in the phrase itself. You have to monitor the behavior of the insect to get your answer. The letters in the words do not give a clear answer by themselves—especially if you are looking at them centuries later.

What do you do with the word butterfly? Is it attracted to butter? Does it look like butter? And why is a zipper in a pair of slacks called a fly? A horseshoe goes on a horse, but a shoehorn does not go on a horn. And a gumshoe is a common slang phrase for a detective or an investigator. Confusing, isn’t it?

The point is that looking at the roots of words must be done with care because the development of language is not a scientific endeavor. It’s risky to break compound words into their parts and draw sharp conclusions about meaning.

The best clues to the meaning of the word are (1) the immediate context; (2) the use of the word elsewhere by the same author—like Mark’s 41 uses of the word translated immediately, which occurs only 17 other times in the entire New Testament; and (3) the use of the word in similar documents—like “grace and peace” in the New Testament letters. Of all these principles, context offers the best guide for the use of a word.

If you’re a growing student of the Bible, by all means use the tools that are available. But be careful about putting lots of weight on the possible root meaning of a word and attaching too much significance to what it origin might have been. In the absence of clear evidence, silence is always wiser than speculative conclusions.

We live in an age of psychological analysis. That reality has given us legions of psychologists and psychiatrists. Another consequence is that it has changed the way those of us who are not clinically trained think. We may not have advanced degrees, but we think in psychological categories. We hear of someone’s behavior and in an offhand remark state that in our opinion they are “mental” or “schizophrenic”, or acting in “passive-aggressive” manor. The language of psychology colors our vocabulary.

Another result of the impact of viewing life through the lens of pop psychology is that it changes the way we read narratives—especially biblical narratives. It’s easy to read into the actions of characters in the Bible and draw iron-clad conclusions about the motivation behind their actions. This is very tempting for those of us who teach and preach from the biblical text. It’s also an approach the casual reader of the Bible can unwittingly drift into. If a student of the Bible is not careful, this psychological grid can become a mainstay of the way they interpret the biblical text.

Is it always wrong to tentatively speculate about what might have motivated someone to engage in a certain act or respond to events in a certain way? No. But we must be very careful. It is too easy to declare that a biblical character made a certain choice because of the motivation we assign to him or her.

For example, in Luke 17 the gospel writer tells the story of Jesus cleansing ten men who had leprosy. (See Luke 17:11-19.) He directed all of them to go and show themselves to the priests. As they did so, they were miraculously healed. One of them came back to Jesus and thanked him in person. The others did not. Why? Were they too busy? Were they basically ungrateful? Did they become caught up with celebration and forget? Were they eager to be restored to friends and family?

We are not told exactly what their motives were or what prompted them not to return to Jesus. We are told that the single leper came back was a Samaritan and that he was grateful. We can use this text to show the importance of gratitude and how Jesus blessed the one who remembered who his healer was. But to assign motives to the others and teach about busyness, pride, or loving family more than loving Jesus is to go beyond the bounds of the text. Unless the text provides sufficient and unambiguous evidence, we are not warranted in assigning reasons for behavior and teaching principles built on our speculation.

If a motivation is clear in scripture, then we are on firmer ground. For example, Acts 17:5 states that the Jews in Thessalonica were jealous of the popularity of Paul and Silas. Because of this jealousy, they “rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city.” This historical incident demonstrates the length to which jealousy can take someone.

As a teacher, I find it easy to slip into the motivational fallacy. Part of the thought patterns of our day urges us to ask the question, “What made them do that?” Feeling like we must answer that question can cause us to teach speculation as truth and inadvertently mislead others.

A wiser approach is to say, “I don’t know” when the text is silent. Sometimes we might say, “It could be that…” or “It’s possible that…” But we must be clear to advertise our speculations. Otherwise we will create a generation that will take our presumptions as truth and move farther beyond them in their own study and reading. We must remember that the Bible is valuable for what it does say and what it does not say.

Students of the Bible are not required to answer all the questions that might be asked of a text—only those that the text itself answers. That’s especially true of the motivations of people whose actions are recorded in the historical narrative.

Many locales have “good Samaritan” laws designed to protect those who try to help others in distress. This class of legislation points back to a parable Jesus told involving someone he portrayed as an unlikely hero—a resident of Samaria who acted kindly toward an injured Jew. The Jews listening to this account would have been aghast. This would have been equivalent to writing a short story today and portraying the son of a Klu Klux Klan member as the noble character.

This kind of depiction reminds us that parables are not history. They are stories. Some of them contain elements that could easily have happened, like a woman looking for a lost coin until she finds it. Others include features that are there because of the plot Jesus was painting, but are unlikely to have a parallel in real life. For example, in Matthew 18:24 Jesus speaks of a man who owes a debt of 10,000 talents. A single talent was about 3,000 shekels, or about 75 pounds of silver or gold in weight. When you do the math, the size of the debt that was forgiven was astronomical.

All this helps us understand that when we are studying parables, we are looking at details that may be realistic, but which are not history. They are part of a story with a purpose. One trap serious analysts of the Bible have is that they treat the details of parables as if they are history. It’s like analyzing the building codes in the story of the “Three Little Pigs.” Such questions are meaningless because they don’t apply to a work of fiction. In the Bible we could ask how the two servants who doubled their talents in Matthew 25 did so. How long did it take? Did they use the equivalent of aggressive growth stocks? Was it through flipping houses? But such questions are frivolous because parables are stories designed to teach a primary lesson. We do not have to understand the details of first century banking in order to benefit from their purpose. In fact, speculating about the ‘missing’ details is an exercise in futility.

The creator of the story—Jesus in the case of the gospels—creates a believable but fictitious account in order to convey a truth. We waste our energy asking what kind of road the seed fell on and why the farmer was so careless as to plant some seed there. We tend to invent a detailed back story and infuse all kinds of psychological insights into the characters in the parable we know as the “Prodigal Son.” But these were not real people. They may have behaved in some ways like real people, but to invest huge amounts of energy in adding depth to the story is to miss the point of a parable. Jesus gives enough detail to teach a point. We are not at liberty to embellish the account as if it were historical narrative.

I have read religious books that go to great lengths to fill in the “missing pieces” of parables in an attempt to enrich our understanding of them. Some historical background is helpful, but some works of this kind draw pages of conclusions from additions and assumptions that are not germane to Jesus purpose in creating the story.

Much of what we would like to know is deliberately missing because it’s not part of the mini-plot. (It’s like books films in which the main characters never need to go to the bathroom. Such bodily functions are not normally essential to the story line.) Jesus, being the great communicator he was, gives us enough material to learn the intended lesson from the story. We must be careful in our use of parables not to be overly zealous in the way we handle them. Wise readers of scripture seek to learn the core teaching they teach without taking liberties at making them more than the creative teaching stories they are.

Implications of Scripture

If we are to correctly handle God’s revelation in the Bible, we must operate on the principle that the author of any particular text determines the meaning of what the Spirit inspired them to write. We are not at liberty to construct our own meaning independent of the author. Creating our personal, subjective meanings makes the whole communication process a meaningless game. We cannot interact in any kind of healthy way with others today when we assign arbitrary meaning to what they write or say. We should not do so to the texts of scripture as well.

Many would agree with this principle. The author may determine the meaning, but I control the implications. Even here, we must be careful not to hijack the process. For example, Leviticus 17:12 states, “None of you may eat blood, nor may an alien living among you eat blood.” There are some who look at that prohibition and conclude that one of the implications is that blood transfusions are disallowed. In their minds, to take the blood from one human being and transfer it to another is anathema to God.

But here we must let the text determine the implications of the principle. Here the context proves to be very helpful. The next verse states, “Any Israelite or any alien living among you who hunts any animal or bird that may be eaten must drain out the blood and cover it with earth.” It’s clear that the blood in question is the blood of animals used for food. The text is not speaking of medical procedures. It’s describing God’s plan for how food is prepared when it is derived from animals. Verse 14 adds that the life is in the blood of the animal. It reflects a principle better understood since the advent of modern medicine. We now know more about how the bloodstream functions to keep the cells of the body alive and healthy.

We can apply this principle to the way we prepare duck, pheasant, beef, or chicken. But the intent of the author does guide the implications so that we do not have the liberty to transfer this concept over to the arena of medical care. God addresses that issue elsewhere, but not in this text.

Here’s another example. Paul advises Timothy, “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.” (See 1 Timothy 5:23.) Someone might contend that since there is a command here to stop drinking water only, our diet should not be confined to water. Doing so would violate the imperative in the verse.

Here we look again at the author’s intent as we consider the implications. Paul’s epistles fall into a category of what we call “occasional letters.” They were written to a specific audience—Timothy here—for a specific purpose. They may contain counsel that applies only to the original recipients. We must consider that context before constructing any implications.

Apparently Timothy was having some kind of medical difficulty because of the contaminated water that he sometimes found himself drinking. Paul was concerned about his protégé bouts with sickness and how that impacted his ministry. So he gave him personal advice about what he might do. If he were giving advice to missionaries today, he could have said, “Boil the water you drink.” He advised him to drink some wine because it was less likely to contain contaminants.

If the author shapes the implications of a text, we are free to see here an encouragement to take care of ourselves, or perhaps to show concern for the physical welfare of others who share the work of the kingdom. We see these principles in the text. The purpose of the text is not to influence the kinds of fluids we consume—whether soft drinks, coffee, tea, milk, wine, or prune juice. To attempt to make implications from this text along those lines is to deviate from the intended purpose of the author.

The principles, examples, and precepts we find in scripture do produce implications that affect the way God wants us to act today, but in arriving at these implications, we must be careful to let the text and context of the passages shape our thinking.

The previous blog dealt with the principle that meaning flows from the intent of the author. It is the task of the reader or the student to understand what the author intended to convey.

Some would object by arguing that we can’t know everything that was in the author’s mind at the time. If we don’t know the mental state of the author, are we not trying to do the impossible? This question reflects the Freudian attitude of our age and our obsession with psychology. We cannot get inside the motives and emotions of the writer unless he chooses to disclose them. But that is not the objective of a reader. Our task is to interact with what the writer actually said—not with what we presume to be their psychological process.

When you and I take on the role of the communicator, we are not interested in providing the reader with a psychological profile of our lives. (Some who use Facebook attempt to do that, but it’s not the motive behind most of our communication.) We want to convey our enthusiasm for baseball, our conviction that the sales team can do a better job, describe how we rebuilt the transmission, or discuss the struggles of our sister-in-law.

To require that readers must understand the inner workings of the author in order to really understand what is being said requires that we operate in God-mode. It’s an expectation that renders virtually all communication pointless because we do not have access to that level of information in normal communication. Worse, it overlooks the things we can know from the writings of others.

We do not have to psychoanalyze Jeremiah to understand the urgency of following God and the folly of ignoring His truth. Jeremiah discloses some of his true emotion has he writes, especially in Lamentations. We do learn something about Jeremiah’s humanity as we read his words. But his feelings are secondary. He conveyed a message with a purpose given to him by God. The first question we must bring to the text is, “What is God saying through Jeremiah.” As we put our energy into answering that question, we steer clear of the sandbars of psychological analysis upon which too many modern readers get stuck.

When Christians talk about the teaching of the Bible, we sometimes discuss a passage and say something like, “Well, this is what the passage means to me.” That kind of statement can be problematic, depending on what we are asserting.

The tricky part of the statement is the final two words—to me. That can imply that scripture is like Play-doh, and that meaning belongs to the reader. Some would contend that any teaching in scripture can have multiple meanings because each reader brings their own ideas to the text. They manufacture a fresh meaning built on their subjective thinking and their individual circumstances. The text becomes elastic and capable of teaching nearly anything. It’s bounded only by the imagination and creativity of the reader. We may be very sincere that our conclusions work for us, and so we claim a personal truth that need not apply to anyone else.

Let’s take an example. Suppose several people are discussing John 14:6, where Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.”

• Wanda looks at the passage and concludes that it “means” that she should confront her Catholic neighbor who believes that she has access to the Father through Mary.
• Barry says that it “means” that every religion points to Jesus.
• Walt maintains that it “means” that we should work to demolish all denominations because Jesus wants everyone to focus on him.
• Gail believes it “means” that Jesus is setting himself up as a philosopher because he is using Hellenistic concepts like Socrates referring to abstract concepts like way, truth, and life.
• Mitch asserts it “means” that Jesus is claiming that he is the exclusive redeemer of mankind, the only one who provides access and reconciliation to God the Father.

Such diverse responses are impossible to mediate if meaning is owned by the reader. If truth is defined by “what it means to me,” then there is no way to arrive at understanding any truth or concept external to the reader. Most of us may recall an occasion when we drew a conclusion from an email we received that distorted our attitude toward the writer. We may have injected ideas into the worlds that were not in his or her mind. This led to unnecessary tension or conflict because we were acting on the basis of subjective things we brought to the email rather than the content itself.

When we are the author of the written or spoken words, we can become irate at those who would twist, distort, or misinterpret our words to mean something we did not intend. Parents learn to be careful around children who will hear, “I’ll think about taking you swimming today” and reinterpret it to mean, “Go get your swimsuit. I promise we’re going!” We want others to listen carefully so that they will know what we are saying and what we are not saying.

One of the key concepts essential to understanding language is that meaning is determined by the author. It comes from what he consciously intended to say. It is the will of the author that determines the meaning of the symbols (words) that he or she used to communicate truth. Our task is to seek to understand that meaning as clearly as possible. We are not at liberty to inject foreign ideas into the text or uncover hidden meanings that match our preference or prejudices.

The consequence of this reality is that every text of the Bible has only one meaning. And that meaning is determined by the author and not the reader. (We’ll discuss implications in the next blog.) Our job is to do our homework and seek to the best of our ability to understand what the author intended to say. God’s involvement in the process of inscripturation ensures that the original meaning is what He wanted. It does not change this dynamic. Our task is to use all the resources we have to understand what the author willfully intended to communicate when the words were recorded.

What about different conclusions? They reflect varying degrees of careful thought among the readers. Some inject their own “meaning” that is totally alien to the text. Others overlook the context, and miss out on the author’s intent. Others get closer, but perhaps overlook some principles for accurate interpretation. And some through careful reading and reflection capture the essence of what the words actually mean. It is that place we must seek to go as we accept Paul’s charge to Timothy: “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.” (See 2 Timothy 2:15.)