catapult magazine

One of the biggest problems I have with the Bible’s purpose in Christianity is that it seems that there’s always a slippery slope on which it’s interpretted. For example, a couple hundred years ago Sunday/Sabbath observance had a completely different meaning than it does today. In some societies, you just didn’t work on Sunday. Period. But even within my lifetime, Christians I’ve known have changed their own views on Sunday observance. It’s as if the Ten Commandments are being slowly phased out because of contemporary culture. Now I’ve heard the arguments that it’s more of a lifestyle of Sabbath observance and all that, but the bottom line is, the Bible says don’t work on Sunday and we’re coming up with more and more reasons to override that. I’d even say that many of the reasons seem valid to me. But why? Why did we wait until now to decide to override something chiselled in stone?

Women’s role in the church used to be more clearly defined. Now, in comes the tide of feminism, and we’re looking at the places that say “No women speaking in church” and saying that hey, that’s not for us, that’s a cultural norm rather than a moral one. And quite possibly that’s true. We’re a different society, where women don’t have the same roles as men anymore, and so it’s not so necesary to maintain such a male-dominated order to things. BUT my question is this: when you look down the road, at the pace we’re going, what other Biblical things are we going to be throwing out? Think of your grandparents and how stick-in-the-mud you thought they were about ditching hymns during worship. Well, imagine if some of the things you hold as ABSOLUTES were re-interpretted by your kids to fit the norm of society. How can the Bible really be relevant if we’re always reinterpretting it? Are we moving towards a Bible that only has meaning as an allegorical narrative?

Christianity is a religion that says there are absolutes. But with the path we are taking on interpreting the Bible, will that be true in a thousand years (should there be another thousand to come)? Will we be down to “love God and the rest of the Bible is outdated”? Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill . . .

I think that in the not-too-distant future, most of the organized church will condone gay marriages. And I think that most of the honest, thinking, heart-commitment Christians will be right there with it. Whether that’s a good thing, a bad thing, or otherwise, I honestly can’t say. But what I can say is that the church of yesterday told us it was WRONG. And they didn’t say, “It’s wrong, but it may become right if society changes.” And both that church and the church of the future looked or will look at the Bible before coming to their conclusions on the matter. SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE. What is it? What am I not seeing here?

Are there really absolutes?

Point to dan. I hang my head with shame for asking such a leading question. My apologies.

Actually, though, I plead innocent of the presupposition that dan is accusing me of. One tradition of thought which certainly has gained some power in North American in the last century argues that churches and so on get in the way of true communion with God, and that if we could just get away from them, our God-connection is stronger. It seems to me that tradition makes some sense in that churches can screw up the Bible as badly as an individual can. I wonder, though, how as an individual you check yourself for rationalization and distortion. Sometimes I wonder how a church does the same thing.

ahem dan — nice one.

No need to be ashamed for such a question.

I would add the question: how is it possible to read the Bible apart from a community? How did you learn to read after all? All by yourself? Everyone learns what thoughts to think, what questions to ask, what to read into or out of a text, what language to use in order to communicate with others in their “community”. And even if you think you’re reading the Bible all by yourself or experiencing God for your own self, such an experience is possible only because Scripture is already coming down to you from culture to culture, community to community.

We read the Bible from some community’s understanding of how we ought to read and experience God in Scripture (as eddie is doing by reading according to Bonhoffer’s instructions). If someone thinks they can get more out of the Bible without the interference of community interpretations, they are always already buying into a certain community’s interpretation which, as BBC pointed out, seems to be prevalent in contemporary culture.

If there is any truth to be found in the Bible, then, it would only be found by reading with the appropriate Spirit, which can be experienced in church, in the family or by learning the rules written within the text itself, but it must be learned in one community or another. And though it is true that many people read Scripture from many different perspectives, we don’t have to give in to the temptation of thinking that Scripture is therefore overwhelmingly complex and open to infinite amounts of interpretations.
The one interpretation that matters is the one that is very rich, but consistent, the one that brings salvation upon the hearer, which is what cvk might have been suggesting all along.

i am not so sure i agree grant. i think that reading alone, can only develop a certain closeness with our Maker that you can’t experience with others present. not only a closeness but an understanding. You didnt get to know girlfriends or wives — assuming that is you situation, by having hundred of people along on your dates did you? i think not. and that is someone, human albiet, that you are extremely close to. God is the next step and to experience ulitmate closeness with him, i think alone time is the key time.

and saying that we didnt learn to read alone . . . can we trivialize this anymore? i think not.

not sure if the Bonhoffer thing is a compliment or complaint. . .

I suppose if you experience God best by being apart from others, then it is indisputable that this is indeed an experience you have. But at least keep in mind that the sections of the Bible you are reading were not originally intended to be read outside of a group. Paul’s letters were written to be read out loud (as all written works were in those days) to a large group of people gathered in one place. I would guess that many, if not all, the books of the Old Testament were intended in much the same way.

The idea that one ought to detach one’s self from the crowd in order to really hear the Word of God authentically may be more connected to the spirit of the monks in the second or third century or to the thinkers of scholasticism (who came a few hundred years after the books of the New Testament were written).

And a criticism of Bonhoffer was not intended. I just thought it proved that we learn how to read the Bible from other people and within certain communities (and by this, I do not mean learning our ABC’s, but learning how to read Scripture as it was meant to be read, i.e. as an entire story of salvation, not just as a collection of rules and propositions to follow).

Let’s also not forget that it’s impossible to read the Bible apart from some sort of community. If you’re reading the King James Version, it’s an interpretation. If you know Greek and you’re reading the original Greek text, you’re still interpreting based on what you know of the language, and how each writer expressed what was given to him. And even if you were able to somehow hear the words as Jesus/Paul/Solomon spoke or wrote them, you’re still dealing with the poor vessel of language as a means of conveying meaning. Anyone who has studied the history of thought will probably agree that language is a poor communicator, though it is the best man can do. It’s not a question of how accurate your reading is, it’s still burned away in the end. It still comes down to a risk; a wager. There’s no way to know for sure that your reading is correct, just like there’s no way to somehow magically prove that what you believe is true.

Religion in general tends to take the mystery out of the mysterious, and try to quantify it—hence the brand of Christianity which inspired the thread. I feel more and more that I have to pick through the muck to find anything true. I incline more and more toward’s Paschal’s Wager (which is basically what it sounds like) as a means of understanding faith. The funny thing is, most of the arguments I’ve heard that support the idea of surety get lost in the very language which is used to explain it. Surety implies indentifiability (don’t know if that’s a word), when faith is by nature unidentifiable.

If you say that having Jesus in your heart is what makes you sure, how can you know that “having Jesus in your heart” means the same thing to you as to the next person? To a Mormon? To a Brazilian tribesman bred on witchcraft, who has only heard the germ of the gospel message? If you can be sure, why can’t they? Surety, I think, is what we teach our children, to their detriment.

The Word is living and active. It’s God’s revelation to us. There are three steps to reading the Word (and prophecy, dreams, other revelations, etc.)
1) Revelation- What does it actually say
2) Interpretation- What does it mean
3) Application- So what?

It gets sticky, b/c we have the revelation in an imperfect translation, passages are interpreted differently because of symbolism and prophecy in the Bible. And personal application can be (and usually is) different every time we read the passage. Thankfully, we have the Holy Spirit, so we don’t have to rely on our own understanding.

As far as intimacy, Jesus went out alone to be alone with God many times, but it was always in preparation to serve others- ie. before crucial points in his ministry, before crucifixion, etc.

As far as surety, I believe the Bible. I’ve never had an experience that would discount it. I don’t know if I could prove to a philosophy professor’s standard that I exist, but I believe I do. And I have just as much evidence that God exists as that I exist.

What do you mean we don’t have to rely on our own understanding? Our own understanding is the only thing we have. Without our own understanding, we don’t perceive God or commune with him at all. This is an example of one of those phrases that means nothing to me—it sounds nice but what does it really mean?

And what do you mean when you say you have more evidence for God’s existence than your own? That, to me, is utterly unfathomable. You can say you have as much faith in God’s existence as your own. I see no evidence for God apart from faith. You say creation is evidence, and an atheistic macro-evolutionist/big bang advocate says it’s evidence of something different. Such evidence is based on faith and is not really evidence in the traditional sense of the word. Self-awareness, on the other hand, is much more common to all faiths.

You say interpretation is where it gets sticky, but I say that it’s already sticky before you begin to use language like Interpretation and Application. You’ve based your whole argument on your understanding of the Bible—which, you admit, may have sticky parts. If there are problems with interpretation, why would we then seek to define our interpretation of the Bible in its own terms? It’s like being a cop investigating a murder and asking the defense lawyer how you ought to conduct the investigation. Not . . that the Bible is like a murder suspect. (Bad example. It was the best I could come up with.)

We are so confused right now when it comes to issues of absolute truth. But maybe our focus on absolutes, which was a thing of our past, is the problem. I think many of us are shaken by the rapid changes that have occurred because we defined the world wrongly when we used absolute terminology. Now we are face to face with people of different cultures and we don’t know what to do. Since we’ve spent so much time setting up our ideas of truth in a homogeneous context, we don’t know how to handle encounters with different cultures.

But encountering different cultures is the very story of Scripture! So the Bible is a great place to look for examples of how to engage cross-culturally (though I don’t think “truth” is nearly as big a theme as we often make it out to be). I think it’s only a matter of time before we start to find ways to deal with differences (much is being done already in philosophy to deal with difference itself).

And I stand by my claim that the Bible is not nearly as mysterious, confusing and open to interpretative variation as people say. People just don’t read it properly. A person cannot read Moby Dick and say: “I believe it’s about a bloated shark that wishes it was accepted as a whale and so lashes out because of its loneliness.” The words of the novel itself, when taken together, do not support such a claim. In the same way, when Scripture is taken as a whole, it dramatically limits the possible number of valid interpretations.