Second Guessing the Basics

I tend to read my Bible far more critically than I did two or three years ago. Things I’d normally just gloss over as a given I now sit and toy with in my head, second guessing myself as to whether or not some of the foundational things I believe are really there or if they apply to me.

This morning I read Matthew chapter 1. Now in verse 21 an angel tells Joseph that he should name the child in Mary’s womb Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. Now normally that would be a fairly standard thing to read – Jesus has come to save people from their sins - we all know that, but that’s not actually what it says. It says that Jesus has come to save Israel from the national sin and guilt that hangs over them in their constant rejection of their covenant God – well at least that’s how a first century Jew (Matthew’s proposed audience) would have read it. From there my mind jumps into overdrive second guessing my understanding of Jesus’ coming to save people from sin.

So I start asking myself all sorts of questions: Did Jesus come to save everyone from their sins or just national Israel? When the New Testament talks about sin is it talking about the way modern evangelicals talk about it or is it talking about the specific covenantal sin of Israel? All these sorts of questions pop into my head. In the end I had to turn to Acts and read the accounts of Phillip and the Ethiopian and Peter and Cornelius just to be reminded that ultimately Christ’s work does extend to all the nations and all sorts of sin. It was fairly handy exercise for me in the end as my faith in Christ’s work was firmed up yet at the same time I read the gospel story with a bit more historical clarity and integrity. It can seem a bit of a risky exercise but it does yield fruit in the end.

Functionally Illiterate?

In the past few years I’ve sat in a lot of group bible studies working with the English text of scripture. Sometimes I’ve been leading them, sometimes I’ve merely been a participant. The aim of these study groups has been to get to the plain reading of scripture (and that doesn’t always mean the literal reading of scripture. Often the two are vastly different from each other – but that’s another blog post). You want to get behind the author’s intent bearing in mind the various layers of context you need to work through in order to gain something of a satisfactory reading of the text.

As I work side by side with others in these groups I’ve begun to notice a slight discrepancy which has the potential for some error. A lot of first language English speakers in this country are functionally illiterate. They can only read the English text at a fairly basic and obvious level, without taking real cognisance of the grammatical flow of a particular passage. This has become especially apparent to me as we’ve looked at passages in the epistles where one needs to do a bit of discourse analysis to derive meaning. You can’t really do proper discourse analysis without a functional understanding of how grammar works. And this is exactly what I’m finding lacking in many people who speak English as fluently as the Queen.

What its done to my thinking is forced me to rethink how we do bible study because now I’m aware that not only am I trying to lead a group to unpack a text but in some ways we’re learning grammar too. A form of bible study that is heavily reliant on discourse analysis is going to miss quite a few people. The reality though is that discourse analysis is necessary if you’re after accurate meaning and so we need to somehow both do discourse analysis in small groups as well as teach it along the way in a simple understandable manner. We must bear in mind that we want to also help those studying the text with us in small groups or home groups to be able to gain skills that will help them access more and more of the text in their own personal reading. I’m not sure what that looks like yet. Any suggestions?

BTW – I know my grammar are rubbish on most of my post, but that are just laziness!

Genesis 6 – Poor Animals!

In the last few months I’ve been scanning the bible for links between humanity and the creation and the relationship between the gospel and the complete re-creation of all things. Here’s an interesting little insight I came across in Genesis 6 and 7 this morning.

Notice that God gets ticked with the wickedness and rebellion of humans – so what does he do? Well he drowns almost the entire animal and bird population! Yes he drowns the people too – but we expected that. The poor animals go to Davey Jones’ locker because of man’s rebellion. Seems that somehow the fate of the natural world is intrinsically tied to the relationship between people and God. And so when God rescues Noah and his family animals get rescued too – now you might argue that God only rescues the animals because Noah and his family won’t last for very long in a world with out animal life. But then you come to Paul in Romans 8:19

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”

Humanity getting rescued leads to the liberation, ultimately, of the entire creation – that seems to be the biblical pattern. The crux question though for us then is: How does this affect the rescued Christian’s relationship to the natural creation?

M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan

Anyone out there attempting the M’Cheyne Bible Reading plan this year? (If you don’t know what it is check out Michael Foster’s post). I last did it about 5 years ago I found it really helpful…tough…but helpful. Let me know if you’re going to have a go at it (even if you’re only planning on doing half the plan this year), maybe we can start a Facebook group or something to encourage each other as we go along (or other suggestions?)…

Anyone got any insight?

I have been trying to understand what Paul means in Colossians 1:24 when he says;

“Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.”

We can know from the rest of scripture that he can’t mean that Christ’s death did not fully acheive all that scripture tells us and as one sees in the previous verses and the rest of Pauls argument he clearly keeps reminding the Colossians that Christ is sufficient and that they must not move from the gospel but remain rooted in it (1:23). So we know from that that Paul himself is not saying that the cross is not enough. So what then does he mean when he says “…I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions…”

If anyone can point me to a good commentary or book that might help understand in the context of Colossians what Paul means that would be great, or if anyone has any insight that would be helpful please leave a comment or e-mail me.

Context, Context, Context

This a constant refrain that comes out of my hermeneutics lecturer’s mouth. In hermeneutics class when asked a question and you’re unsure of the answer then simply answer with the word, ‘context’ and there’s a fairly good chance you’ll get it right. In terms of determining the meaning of a text context is king and without it you can pretty much make the Bible say what you want. Now this should be quite straight forward – nothing new. What I was thinking of the other day is how many different types of contexts you have to take into account to derive meaning and then make that meaning understandable. As I see it you have the following contexts to deal with:

Redemptive Historical Context: The Bible is a story of God’s work in the world, it is a story of progressive revelation and therefore it means that texts at certain points of the story, if not connected to the broader story, will become nothing more than proof-texts. My short experience in evangelicalism tells me that this is the most neglected context. We have to locate our texts in the bible storyline before drawing conclusions.

Historical Context: Our text has to be located within the history in which it is set. The Bible is a book written by people living in particular historical settings and we have to take that into account and not assume that the people we’re reading about all had Ipods, Macs and watched ‘Prison Break’ every night on television. This context is a bit tricky in that our knowledge of this context is based on disciplines that fluctuate. I experienced this at university in the Classical Civilizations department where there is a large amount of varying opinion as to exactly what historical conditions were like in certain eras – and opinions constantly change as new findings come to the fore. So whilst this context is helpful and necessary, it needs to be treated with humility and I would be wary of the person who puts too much stock into the historical context in order to derive meaning.

Literary Context: The Bible is literature, we have poetry, history, parable, discourse, apocalyptic etc. etc. We need to be genre sensitive and then we need to learn the rules of those various genres and be able to work with them to derive meaning. The Bible is not a systematics textbook where the meaning is just set down for you in neatly packaged propositional statements.

Those three are the standard contexts that you’ll learn about in a hermeneutics class. There are two others that I want to add:

Historical Theological Context: Texts have a history of interpretation, to ignore that history and the gifted people that God has given to the church through the ages is foolishness. We don’t do hermeneutics as islands, isolated from the rest of the church and so this context needs to be recognized.

Personal Context: I didn’t know what else to call this, but we all come to the text with our own baggage and so a helpful question to ask is, ‘why am I reading the text in this way – what from my own context causes me to see the text in this way’. This is a difficult process as you wade through your socialization, enculturation and present context to try and achieve an as objective as possible reading of the text.

From here you would start to talk about conveying the meaning to specific contexts – but that’s a whole new blog post.

Sophie’s Book

If your interest was aroused by Odette’s last post then you can check out Sophie’s book here.