The Pain of Reinterpreting Scripture

In several recent posts I’ve been referring to the relationship between scripture and evolution, and particularly how I moved from young earth creationism toward theistic evolution not because I studied evolution and became convinced, but because I studied Genesis and became convinced it was not narrative history.

At the same time I’m looking at bit at theodicy, specifically the question of how a God who employs violent means (or at least appears to do so) can also be seen as a good God. This also requires one to look in some perhaps disturbing ways at how we interpret scripture. For example, if I take the Genesis flood to be literal history and also as a direct action of God, then I have a level of violence in God’s behavior towards humans that is much harder to explain, in my view, than the mass extinctions that occurred millions of years ago, or than the ongoing struggle for survival in the natural world.

Why is it so difficult to take a new look at scripture and to decide to take some things in some way other than as a factual historical account or as a transfer of data?

In my own experience I would list fear first. This fear is of two types. There is one’s own fear that in the process of looking at scripture in a different way, one may become separated from one’s community and support structure. I remember sitting down in Hebrew class and encountering some of the classical problems in the way we understand scripture. What was around the next corner?

One’s own fear of losing one’s anchor is bolstered and validated by the fear of one’s family and friends back at home. When I was still in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I thought this was a feature of smaller, more isolated denominations. Now that I am a member of a United Methodist congregation I have come to realize that this is nearly universal. Even in conservative evangelical churches that are sending their young people to conservative evangelical schools there is a tension between the way they have been raised and what they might learn in seminary.

The fact that some young people come back from seminary quite thoroughly altered, and not always to the good, simply feeds into this fear. I would suggest that we look at this differently, however. Might it be possible that less young people would lose their moorings in their community, if that community prepared those young people to joyfully undertake a voyage of discovery rather than repeatedly trying to make those moorings more secure?

Let me illustrate from my programming experience. I recall an early effort written in C, in which I had had a serious bug in a function. I worked on the code but found nothing that I thought should cause the problem. When I tested it again, however, it started to work. There was something in what I had done that had fixed the problem without me knowing it. For some time I was afraid to tinker with that function, because I was afraid that I would break whatever unknown thing I had unknowingly fixed!

I use words built on “unknown” intentionally. Part of the problem we have here is that preachers and teachers do not talk enough about how interpretation is accomplished. To many young people about to leave for college or seminary, Biblical interpretation is a black box. They have read a number of texts and they know how they are supposed to apply, but they aren’t all that sure why. The good thing about the black box is that it is acceptable to their friends and relatives.

At seminary, a professor may ask them to take the black box apart, i.e. to make it no longer be a black box. The professor may suggest applying a different black box just to get the students to start asking what’s inside. There are many tricks of the trade for getting students to think.

I think that there is a fear here on the other side–the fear of pastors that their parishioners won’t sit still to learn what went into interpretation, or that they will choose to get rid of a pastor so irreverent as to tinker with the nuts and bolts of Biblical interpretation. That’s why so frequently even in pulpits held by preachers who are skilled in historical-critical methodologies, we never hear the method, even if it has been applied in preparing the sermon. The results, such as sources, dating of documents, forms, and so forth are presented as the products of another black box.

These black box results are often presented with great confidence, and become, to the parishioners, the true meaning of scripture. When someone else gets different results form the black box, for example dates for Mark that vary from 45 – 85 CE, that’s disturbing, and people begin to wonder if seminary ruined the pastor.

It’s not that easy to solve, because it would require us to spend a little more time dealing with the nuts and bolts and a bit less time merely exhorting congregations to live more precisely according to the interpretations they have always held.

But there would be a major benefit. When you know what goes into creating a new interpretation, you also know how to argue against something that doesn’t make sense, and so instead of a journey into the unknown without a map, you can explore with reasonable confidence, always knowing that there are some landmarks, and if the landmarks run out, you know how to survey the territory.