Finding What We Expect
Last night after my discussion of eschatology, in which I mentioned that we tend to discover what we’re looking for in scripture, I returned to the house. Now I think this warning is important. We need to check our questions. On my hub site, henryneufeld.com, I use the slogan “helping you find the right questions.” It’s important to examine our questions, as they can determine our conclusions.
And life gave me an illustration. My wife generally has dinner about ready to go when I get done with my study. We were having nachos. She dropped something, and I headed around the counter to pick it up for her. Now at the same time as she dropped something (note that I’m not telling you what it was), I had dropped one pinto bean on the floor. I picked that up first. A stepped-upon pinto bean makes a nasty looking mess. In my head now is dropping an item of food while setting up a plate of nachos.
I go around the counter look back and forth and fail to find the item that my wife had dropped. I see nothing anywhere. Finally, she points at the floor, somewhat frustrated. Her cane has fallen and is right there and obvious as can be. So I picked it up and handed it to her.
What happened? I firmly had in my mind that since we were both fixing our nachos and I had just dropped a food item, she had dropped one too. There was no food item on the floor, therefore there was nothing to pick up. I was totally unaware of the cane, much larger than a food item, sitting there hidden in plain sight.
The question I have is just how many answers will be hidden in plain sight as we study the scripture because we know what is there?
I think this also relates to the idea that the Bible is its best interpreter. A hermeneutic that ignores authorial intent and context, and treats all of the Bible as one flat source where pieces of the puzzle are assembled and fitted together, can only see what they think they are to see and often miss the cane on the floor. This then eliminates the possibility that an answer can arise (in certain instances) out of community deliberation and even prayer. After all, the answer is right there in the Bible! One of the greatest traps in this methodology is to treat every word as meaning the same thing in every place. So even such elementary words as faith, gospel, and salvation are transported from one author to another without any sense of possible differences, and there are many. We think we already “know what is there,” yet we don’t.
BTW, I’m glad to see you can pick things up off the floor for your wife. My wife has to pick things up for me!
If you assume the pieces can fit together, more than likely you can figure out a way for them to do so. Allegorical interpretation has provided for many such “fittings.” Dispensationalism is another attempt to force disparate pieces together.
When we know what is there, that is generally what we will see!