Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Protecting Doctrinal Turf

    There’s a church I drive by pretty regularly. They have a quite prominent sign, and on the front of their building they have a list of doctrinal positions held by their church. I used to think it was a singularly unwelcoming sort of thing to put on the front of a church. During Hurricane Ivan, all the signs were apparently damaged by the wind and removed.

    Just today, I drove by and saw that the signs have been put up again. Here’s how they read:

    Fundamental Evangelistic
    Missionary Pre-Millenial
    Independent Traditional
    KJV 1611 KJV 1611

    Yes, KJV 1611 is there twice.

    Now this church, which I will not name, has every right to believe what they want and to put whatever they want on the front of their church. But by putting on the front of the church, they are projecting a message, and I got to thinking about just what that message was.

    Most Christians would notice a few missing items, I think. The word Jesus doesn’t occur. There’s nothing about God’s love, reconciliation, salvation, forgiveness, or service. I don’t imagine that’s for lack of space. They could, for example, have replaced one of the “KJV 1611” entries with “We love you” or “Grace is wonderful” or perhaps just “Forgiven!” But even so, I would have to wonder about their priorities. Somehow, the essence of that church has been boiled down to these eight entries, one of them repeated twice, and there’s really nothing very positive about those entries.

    Some of them seem quite contradictory. For example, we have “fundamental.” Now I am far from a fundamentalist, and I won’t speak for fundamentalism, but most fundamentalists I’ve encountered are interested in getting back to the basics of Christianity. In fact, I’ve rarely had a conversation with a fundamentalist that didn’t center around something about Jesus. I might well have disagreed with what they thought about Jesus and what he was really about, but they were definitely interested in trying.

    But how does “fundamental” fit with “KJV 1611?” The “1611” part should tell us pretty quickly that these people are not interested in any Christian fundamentals. They’re not particularly interested in finding out what Jesus said and did if they rely on a fairly ordinary translation of the Bible made nearly 1600 years after Jesus lived. What is fundamental about a translation anyhow?

    On the other side we have “Pre-millenial.” If I remember rightly, before the hurricane it included pre-tribulationist as well. If that is the case, I congratulate them on moving that little gem of doctrine down their priority list. But pre-millenial isn’t exactly all that fundamental or traditional either. It’s just one of many ways of interpreting Revelation, something people with very fundamentalist views can easily disagree on, and fundamentalists in my experience often agree to do just that.

    Then we have “missionary” and “evangelistic.” But again, this goes with KJV 1611. What’s missionary about forcing people to use a Bible that is in a language they barely understand if they do at all. Evangelism is the spreading of the good news. But what good news is contained in the eight items emphasized on this church’s front wall?

    In fact, these two words, “missionary” and “evangelistic” strike me as the least appropriate entries in the list. This list is inward looking. It’s self-congratulatory. It’s designed to bring in people who agree with the congregation on complex doctrinal details. There is nothing particularly missionary about it. There is no good news here. There is only an invitation for the “in” crowd to come join the club.

    There is indeed very little independent about this. There may be no external denominational control, but that may well be for the worse, because there is no way to correct a self-destructive tendency of doctrine.

    Now I do spend some time attacking the teachings of the KJV Only crowd. I think the KJVO movement is pretty silly. I’ve talked about it a good bit before. (See my Bible Translations FAQ for more information or my book What’s in a Version?.)

    What I want to point out here is that it is very easy for us, as Christians, to put our doctrines on our sleeves, and let our doctrines determine who we will fellowship with. We let our doctrines replace our discernment. We let the “stuff” we believe replace the need to serve other people. We need to not only proclaim good news, but we need to be good news. One can get doctrines get in the way whether one is liberal, moderate, conservative, charismatic, pentecostal, evangelical, or fundamentalist.

    The real question is not what your doctrines acutally are. It is whether your doctrines allow you to put people first.

    I believe it is quite possible for people to be “saved” or “in right with God” or “in good spiritual health” with a wide variety of doctrinal positions.

    Doctrines can be good. They can keep us pointed in the right direction. But as soon as you find your doctrines getting between you and other people, perhaps you need to check them out. After all, Jesus said of people, “You will know them by their fruit” (Matthew 7:16). He said it of people. I would suggest it’s one test you must apply to doctrines as well.

  • Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals – New York Times

    Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals – New York Times

    Intelligently designing voters designed a new school board. Though many votes were close, the sweep was apparently universal. I’m very pleased to see that the voters can make an intelligent decision like this. It is my hope that this becomes an example for the rest of the country.

    The whole community, especially parents, needs to get involved in the process of education. We pay big attention to presidential races, but often very little attention to school board races. Turnout is low, and people with very questionable ideas and programs can get elected without most of their constituents even being aware of it.

    That’s not the fault of the politicians, folks. It’s the fault of constituents who don’t research about their candidates and make their choice on election day.

    See some more of my views on education and politics in Make Education a Priority.

  • Must I Give My Life?

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    Does the command of Jesus to love one another mean that I have to give up my life?

    I’ve been involved in debating that issue over the last couple of weeks on the Compuserve Religion Forum.. It seems to me that the issue is not very debatable, that it’s clear that a faith that was founded by someone who gave up everything, including his life, and underwent the greatest possible humiliation in doing so, would regard giving up one’s life as the highest ideal.

    But is it a command? Is it something we’re expected to do? Is it a sin if I don’t?

    First let me make some distinctions. I don’t think Jesus is telling his disciples they need to run into every burning building. Nor is he telling his disciples they need to abandon all wisdom. Sometimes no life can be saved, and the risk is not appropriate. Sometimes you will just die without accomplishing anything. But when the you get to that final case, the one where you are quite certain your life will be lost, but you can save someone else, Jesus is giving you an example.

    I’m not saying that Jesus expected us to be perfect. He knew we weren’t. Paul said that he had not attained (Philippians 3:12-16). The author of Hebrews said we should go forward toward perfection (Hebrews 6:1). That doesn’t mean we’re always going to live up to it. But it does mean that providing excuses for doing less is not an option. We need to hope and pray that we can live in that manner. Probably you, like me, are not 100% certain of what you would do. Unless you’ve faced that situation, I’m not sure you can be. But the example has been given, the ideal portrayed.

    Most particularly, I think, this applies to situations in which one is faced with the necessity of compromising with evil in order to save one’s own life. The standard scenario for discussing this is the holocaust. To put it simply, most of Poland’s Jews died; most of Denmark’s were saved. Why? Because in Denmark people stood up to the Nazis as a nation, together. Each person contributed what little they could. In Poland, there were many, many individuals who made an effort, but for the most part, people chose to save their own lives.

    Their position is easy to understand. Each one might have felt that they would only lose their lives if they took action. But each action in standing up to evil can help generate actions by others. Good can grow and multiply, just like evil.

    Thank God for those who do stand up, who live up to the ideal.

  • The West Wing Debate

    CNN.com – ‘West Wing’ candidates clash in live debate – Nov 7, 2005

    I really enjoy The West Wing. As a show, while they have had many episodes I think were mediocre, they have also had shining moments in which they project an image of what politics could be like, and really should be like.

    In this live debate episode they challenge the really stupid way in which presidential debates are conducted these days. There is, in fact, no point to the debates that we have. They are scripted media events with no real opportunity to evaluate the candidates.

    Why do candidates do it that way?

    Because we, the voters, let them by with it. We allow ourselves to be coaxed into making decisions based on media images, rather than going deeper into what the candidates have stood for in the past, what their experience is (and how well they went through that experience), and where they are going to go next.

    I’d like to suggest something. If there are any further presidential debates that are run as scripted, rule-bound programs, that don’t give us an opportunity to really learn about the candidates, that spend two minutes on serious, complex issues, let’s just refuse to watch.

    Change the channel.

    Cut them off!

    I don’t mean that we won’t vote or we won’t make a serious effort to learn about the candidates. But there are many ways to do that. There a newspaper stories and analyses. You can find a variety from a variety of viewpoints on the internet. There are the candidates’ web sites, their platforms and position papers. Find out what those are. Demand that they speak to your issues and answer your questions.

    Further, demand that your media representatives–they are, after all, selling their product to you–provide you with information. If they ask a question, and the candidate gives the spin of the day instead of answering it, don’t air the answer. Throw out all the tape of saying the same thing.

    Let’s hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

  • The Importance of Small Actions

    Recently Rosa Parks passed away. Many people mourn her passing, and rightly so. She made a major difference in American life.

    But in another sense, the attention paid to her is strange–not “bad” strange, but “good” strange. We tend to notice people who do the big things, the spectacular things, the very public things. We tend to ignore the people who do the small things, except for those few occasions when one small thing leads to so many others. But most of the time, most things that are done in the world are accomplished by many people doing small things.

    I think that’s a major reason why so many people think so much of Rosa Parks. She’s an example to the rest of us of what can be accomplished by doing simple things. She’s a challenge to us, because what she did, practically anyone could have done, but she did. And that’s the difference!

    Too many times we are so concerned with finding something spectacular to do, while we neglect the little things that we need to do from day to day. Perhaps you can’t challenge the commentators on TV when they are saying something you think is either stupid or morally wrong. But you can say something to your neighbors and friends about it.

    I have a pet peeve about customer service. I really like retail stores to provide excellent service, and I intensely dislike impolite people in those positions. The other day I was standing in line at a major retailer, and there was a elderly lady ahead of me who was somewhat slow, a bit weak, and her hands shook. She was not dressed well, and her order was not large. The cashier spoke courteously to the lady. She walked around her counter to scan a heavy item, one that most customers could have put on the counter. She treated the lady like one of that store’s most valued customer.

    As I watched, I said to myself, “You’d complain if she mistreated that lady. Somebody needs to know she’s doing her job and doing it well.” So when I got to the counter, I asked how I could provide feedback to her supervisor. There was the inevitable moment when her look asked me, “What did I do wrong?” I assured her that I simply appreciated the courteous, professional manner with which she had dealt with the previous customer. “I was just doing my job. I was just treating her the way I would want to be treated.” I did find her supervior, who also gave me a look of surprise that I would go out of my way after checking out to find her, and report something good about one of her employees.

    I think that cashier was doing the sort of thing Rosa Parks did. I don’t mean to belittle Rosa Parks’ accomplishment in any way. What I want is for us to be challenged to take that extra step, speak that extra word, challenge that common (but wrong) way of doing things, and make life just a little better for the next person.

    This can take many forms:

    • Political action. At a minimum, vote! Even better, study out the various campaigns and talk to your friends about them. If you’re so inclined, get involved in a campaign.
    • Give feedback. Remember, however, to give positive as well as negative feedback.
    • Speak up! When someone is saying something wrong, say something. When someone is doing something wrong, say something. When they’re doing something right, say something!
    • Never be stopped by the thought that something is just a little thing.

    Rosa Parks just refused to give up her seat on a bus.

    Look what a profound impact that action had.

  • Spiritual Warfare with a Comfy Chair

    Before you start reading this, let me warn you that I sometimes make weird connections between one event or word and another.

    Last night I attended a portion of a 24 hour praise and worship marathon. Since I like my comfort pretty well, I took along a nice, comfortable, folding, cloth chair. As I sat there listening to and participating in the music, I told a few of my friends who stopped by to greet me that I was conducting spiritual warfare from a “comfy chair.” This was good for a number of laughs.

    When I got home I remembered another connection. In one of the Monty Python episodes several characters, representing the Spanish inquisition, keep on appearing in the scenes. This is the episode that uses the phrase, “Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!”

    In one of those incidents the inquisitors are preparing to torture someone, and they call for the “comfy chair.” The victim has to sit in the comfy chair, presumably being pressured into confessing. It makes for a good laugh. Those who have seen it will know that it views much better than it tells.

    But this weird chain of connections got me back to thinking about spiritual warfare and what it is; more importantly, what it is not.

    Spiritual warfare is one metaphor used in scripture for the struggles of the Christian life. It’s a bit ironic, though many people who teach and claim to practice spiritual warfare miss the irony and tend to take this literally. Even though Paul tells us that our struggle is not against “flesh and blood,” that is people, many people use spiritual warfare against people. Often this is covered up by saying that one is just going after the spirit, not the person. But many times this distinction is not upheld in practice, and a person can be just as much despised for being troubled by the spirit of something as if they are blamed for all their behavior themselves. “A spirit made me do it” doesn’t work any better than “the devil made me do it.” In addition, it is easy to equate spiritual warfare only with battling “spirits” (however one conceives of them), rather than with all the broader struggles of life.

    The first response to this is to read carefully the way in which the metaphor is used in scripture. Clearly, the broad difficulties of one’s own Christian life are intended as the primary topic. Spiritual warfare involves battling against those things that keep one from moving forward spiritually. Applying this metaphor to one’s own spiritual life avoids the difficulties that result from trying to fight other people through spiritual means, such as negative prayers, accusations, and spiritual or emotional pressure.

    The irony, of course, is that our weapons of warfare are supposed to be contradictory to the normal nature of war, and thus there is the irony of the whole metaphor. Let me illustrate from the gospels. Jesus suggested a procedure for dealing with someone who had offended you in Matthew 18:15-17. One was to go to the person alone first, then with two or three witnesses, and then in front of the whole congregation. If this process of successive efforts to resolve the issue didn’t work, you were then permitted to treat that person as a gentile and a tax collector. But how was it that Jesus treated the tax collectors? Well, he went and ate with them. One of the accusations against him was that he associated with the wrong people.

    That’s why I think that the comfy chair is the perfect adjunct to spiritual warfare, just as it was a very humorous torture implement in the Monty Python episode. What does the comfy chair represent?

    • Love for one’s neighbor
    • Hospitality, even for those we don’t like
    • Non-judgmental attitudes
    • Listening to people with respect
    • Treating people with respect
    • Recognizing that just because our neighbors are different doesn’t mean they’re bad

    Ultimately “comfy chair” spiritual warfare is the kind of spiritual warfare where we refuse to get frustrated, where we treat people with respect, and where no matter what the form of attack may be, our response is one of love–not smothering, manipulative love, but rather the kind of love that results in treating other people as they would like to be treated.

  • Making Science Standards

    Two members of the committe that produced the current science standards in Minnesota have written a summary of the process for the Florida Citizens for Science blog. The Minnesota experience is of interest to Floridians, because Cheri Pierson Yecke has been made our K-12 Chancellor.

    I recommend that Floridians read this summary and ask yourselves just what it is you want taught in the science classroom. This is not a free speech issue, as some have claimed. The issue is the prescribed curriculum and the testing standards for science. I would like to suggest that the best means of determining what should be taught in the science classroom is by asking working scientists, and working from a consensus basis, i.e. that we should teach science that is as broadly accepted as possible. There is no need to teach every theory that is available in the High School classroom; there are proper scientific forums in which such things can be discussed, tested, and then perhaps become accepted science.

    Now like it or not, the theory of evolution is broadly accepted and can be properly regarded as consensus science. I think those who advocate intelligent design should have plenty of opportunities to present their ideas, and in fact they do have such opportunities. I recently commented (ID on West Wing) that I have greater problems with the idea that science teachers will be teaching religion. Religion is much more difficult to test for quality and reliability than is science (perhaps I understate this!) and thus it is much more difficult to provide good standards for it.

    Let’s continue to teach science in Florida’s science classrooms.

  • ID on West Wing

    I want to congratulate West Wing on NBC for providing some thoughtful coverage of the ID issue. While scientific and theological articles and books may cover the issue more thoroughly, intelligent handling in the context of a popular TV show helps get the message through the culture.

    Presidential candidate Matt Santos, played by Jimmy Smits, answers questions indicating that he believes the universe is designed–as a matter of faith, but that he doesn’t want his faith taught in the classroom. In one exchange, an audience member tells him that he wants his children to hear his view in the classroom.

    This latter incident brings up the other side of intelligent design in the classroom. I certainly do not want the science curriculum to be diluted with elements that are not tested science. ID has failed to demonstrate that it is a viable scientific theory. Until it does (an unlikely event), it doesn’t belong in High School science classes. But as a person interested in spiritual matters, and an active, committed Christian, I have an even more disturbing problem with this. Who is going to be teaching religion to the children and young people of my church? When a theological concept is taught in science class, it will have to be taught by science teachers, who are not qualified to teach theology. I find this quite disturbing. Not only are we introducing theology into the science curriculum, but we will almost certainly be introducing incompetent theology there. I doubt that many science teachers are going to be interested in trying to learn to teach theology.

    Of course, as a moderate Christian, I am likely to find some of this theology objectionable. But my more conservative brethren will, I think, find some of it even more objectionable? So why are they advocating the teaching of faith in the science classroom? Simply because this will be a first step. Once you have the precedent set of one religious idea that can be taught in the high school classroom, the next will be much easier. The intention, make no mistake about it, is to get conservative Christian views–the views of only some conservative Christians–introduced into the public school classroom, and enforced on the children of many parents who will disagree.

    So why can’t each of us have “our view” taught in the public school science classroom? First, we don’t all have the same view. To teach “our view” we will have to teach many views. Second, because our faith views are not part of the field of competence of the science teachers, and should not be.

    There is a much better solution. Let’s teach science, consensus science, in the public school science classroom, and leave the teaching of religion to churches, synagogues, mosques, and other private centers of religious education.

    Oh! Wait a minute! That’s what we’re doing now, isn’t it?

  • Worship on a Pale Horse

    In a number of worship services that I’ve attended lately, I have been looking for a word to describe what I experience. Unfortunately, I think I have found that word–pale. (I’ll get to the “horse” thing later!) I don’t intend this as a criticism of any particular church or worship service, nor of any particular style of worship. This “pale” feeling has come over me in a variety of situations and in worship services of just about any style over the last few years.

    I believe that a worship service can be full-blooded no matter what form the service takes. I have been in services that were intensely traditional, high church, contemporary, blended, charismatic, or largely philosophical in style and hardly recongizable as worship at all, and I have found examples of all of these that seemed full blooded–not pale at all. I have personally experienced times of worship that were not in a church building. These include time alone or with a few friends out in nature, times when I was engaged in helping people, or simply moments of meditation. All of these seemed to be full-blooded.

    What do I mean by full-blooded?

    I simply mean a spiritual experience that has integrity and that is directed toward taking the worshipper toward the intended goal. “Pale” worship seems to me to be worship engaged in because we just know we’re supposed to be in church at that particular moment. We attend a worship service because we always do. The church puts on a worship service because that is what churches do. The form of the worship service is determined by what people expect.

    Individual worship experiences, such as time on the beach or in the mountains, or time spent seeking God in your own home are not done just because they are “the thing to do.” But even one’s devotional or meditation time can come to be simply a form or an empty ritual. Please don’t misunderstand me. Ritual can be a good and important thing in a person’s life. Ritual is not bad. The problem is when one goes through the ritual without looking at the meaning.

    Sometimes people use individual experiences as an excuse to leave regular worship and go off on their own. If a person is finding time to be with God, getting social contact, and has some sort of accountability, I have no particular problem with alternatives to the traditional weekly church service. But this can be an excuse to leave a worship service that is not satisfying, and replace it with nothing at all.

    And here is another point. I have been told that calling a worship service “satisfying” or complaining that one has not been “fed” is not valid. Worship, after all, is about God, about presenting worship to God. At one time I agreed with this, at least in part. But even then I had to suggest that one cannot serve God without being refreshed, filled, and yes, satisfied. Jesus himself suggested that worship had to go beyond the expressions pointed Godwards.

    Not everyone who says to me, “Lord! Lord!” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. –Matthew 7:21

    Worship here is not the expression of one’s praise for God, but rather one’s actions, and I believe I am on solid ground in saying that the primary thing that Jesus commanded was to treat one’s fellow human beings appropriately and lovingly. So when I go out and take actions to make the world a better place, to make life better for other people, I am, in fact, carrying out worship. Pointing my worship toward God results in, and is even equivalent to, pointing my actions toward people. If I correctly read Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus even further suggests that someone who never knew the “stuff” and never spoke the words would be acceptable in his kingdom, whereas those who knew the stuff, and spoke the right words, but did not do the deeds will not be acceptable.

    I still think corporate worship, getting a group of people with common mind and heart together in a service of worship, is an important thing. And it’s not just about God. It’s not just about Jesus. Or rather, it is, but not in the way we have thought. Christians often talk about having a relationship and not a religion. If it’s a relationship, communication needs to go both ways. Both sides have needs, both need to hear, both need to speak. And so it’s all about Jesus, but I’m part of his body here on earth, and so it is, in fact about me. It’s not just that I need to get refreshed and fed so I can serve, as important as that is, but the worship is for everyone who is there.

    We need to take seriously being Christ’s body. We need to take seriously being the temple of the Holy Spirit. The worship service is for us, and we need to start to ask that it accomplishes something for us and in us. As believers, as part of the purpose of the worship in the first place we shouldn’t need to force ourselves to attend. We shouldn’t need to force ourselves to get into an attitude of worship. We should be able to lose ourselves in the worship.

    It’s all about Jesus, and that’s why it’s all about me too!

    Is this accomplished by a particular format, or a particular set of elements? I don’t think so. I would suggest that we should have worship services that occur around tables where we eat pizza and chat openly. No, I don’t mean that as a supplement to the regular worship service, so we can eat pizza on Saturday night, but we all need to get to a more traditional form of worship on Sunday morning. What I mean is that worship service might occur at the pizza parlor on Tuesday night, and might not involve singing, Bible reading, or preaching. It might just involve sharing of people’s stories (we use the theological term “testimonies” but that just tends to scare people) about what happened during the week.

    Worship might occur in a very traditional setting. I really like a good high church style service. I feel that I need one every so often. It might occur totally in music. Teaching and learning can occur entirely in the context of music. It might occur in a session of simple Bible reading. We really are afraid of reading the Bible and allowing people to hear it for themselves without the aid of professionals in the church.

    I expect this little essay will annoy more people than just about anything I have written. Messing with worship tends to mess with people’s lives. Many pastors get annoyed at the thought that people may no longer focus on the Sunday morning service. But I don’t think the Sunday morning service is serving many people’s needs. We complain that people are no longer attending church, and we moan and groan about their spiritual and moral commitment. They just don’t value church any more! But what if they are simply leaving the church because they, either as a part of the body of Jesus, or trying to become part of the body, found that the worship was all about somebody else, somebody else who was not in heaven?

    This is where I thought of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Please understand that I don’t think that Revelation 6 is referring to worship. I’m simply using the four horses as an illustration.

    I see the first horse, the white one that goes out to conquer as our approach to worship after a new experience. We try new things, we find new life. Since we’re human, we also make mistakes and sometimes annoy people. One of the great problems with the “spiritual warfare” metaphor in Christianity, is that we mistake making war on the barriers and obstacles in our own spiritual life and experience for making war on others. Conquering results in angry reaction. I’m not blaming this on one group or another. What I’m asking is that we recognize that conflict results from moving onto new ground in any field of endeavor, and even more than average when it is in church activities that are so rooted in tradition.

    The red horse follows which is the conflict. The danger here is that the conflict will replace the desire to worship. At this point we begin to defend “our” worship activities from “those other people.” At this point, the worship is about us, and not about us as part of the body, but about us in our selfish aloneness. It’s “my way or the highway” worship.

    The red horse is followed by the black one. Famine strikes as we will never be satisfied when we make worship about our lonely self. At this point the conflict is what the church is about. Note that this conflict need not be obvious or on the surface. People can be simply avoiding the issue because they are tired of fighting. There is peace when armies are resting between battles, but it is not real peace.

    The pale horse is death, in my use of the metaphor, spiritual death because people are not fed, and cannot see any reason to attend or be part of a spiritual community. The grave follows after.

    It is this worship riding on a pale horse that I sense in some services. There is no effort to make worship relevant or to see that it is fulfilling the needs of all the members. The intention is that worship be “right” more than that it be useful and practical.

    My contention is that Christian worship is now riding out on a pale horse. There are certainly exceptions. There are plenty of opportunities. But in most churches we are afraid to move to completely new modes and methods of worship. The grave is following behind. We guard the monuments to worship in our buildings, our furniture, our forms, and our schedules, keeping them looking good. But good people are leaving because they are not spiritually fulfilled by worship. They see nothing that comes out of worship and pours forth in their daily lives that makes them better, or helps them help others.

    And so they move to others means. Again, don’t get me wrong. Churches do wonderful things. Church goers do wonderful things. But we have lost many people because the worship services no longer seem to mean anything. We need to get these two elements together.

  • Just Your Interpretation

    There’s a quote that often ends discussion of Biblical interpretation. One party to the discussion will announce: “That’s just your interpretation.” Debate is supposed to stop. Everyone is supposed to realize that their view really has no advantage over anyone else’s, and just let the discussion die. One person with whom I correspond occasionally online will express his pleasure that I’m “getting it” whenever I talk about the subjective elements of Bible study, but then he becomes annoyed when I claim that particular interpretations can be excluded, or that one explanation is more probable than another.

    I’m going to deal with this idea very briefly. There are elements here that can be discussed at length, and that can be very complex. But let me suggest that if you’re reading this essay, you probably think that in some way my words have meaning. There is something I intend to communicate, and you can extract at least some of that information from what I write. You may disagree with me completely, but doubtless you think I said something however inane, stupid, or even reprehensible you might think it is.

    In Bible study, when someone suggests that a certain proposition is “just my interpretation” I will often ask them whether the verse is talking about pink elephants. My point? Simply that there is some interpretation that can be excluded. We can be quite certain that our text is not referencing pink elephants. Of course some might suggest that some passages in Revelation may just refer to pink elephants. But that is a completely different story. (For my own comments on understanding Revelation see my study guide, Revelation: A Participatory Study Guide.)

    The difficulty in dealing with the “just your interpretation” charge is that there is considerable truth in it. Often conservative Christians react very strongly to this comment (and often they should do so), but it is easy when reacting strongly to miss the truth. Any interpretation that I propose is my interpretation. Nobody else is to blame for it. Many people have given input, from my earliest teachers in religious education to people I conversed with yesterday, but they are not to blame for what I have accepted and what I have rejected. It is my interpretation. It is a mistake not to acknowledge that. The person who objects to my interpretation also has a right, in my view, to object to that interpretation, but not because it is my interpreation. He should object because there is some problem with it, that he has found some reason to hold a different opinion. That would acknowledge that there is some meaning (or meanings) intended by the author of the passage, and other meanings are unlikely or excluded. (Note that I don’t want to get into a detailed discussion of certain post-modern approaches here in any detail. Suffice it to say that I do believe that authors intend their text to mean something, and that I believe that the communication of that message to those who receive it has a significant value.)

    For many, the problem with understanding texts is that they think of understanding and communication as essentially binary: Either you understand or you don’t; you communicate or you don’t. The one who says “That’s just your interpretation” is focusing on the failures; the one who affirms an absolute and correct interpretation is focusing on the successes.

    But in real life, we don’t deal with this kind of absolute rightness or wrongness. I attempt to communicate regularly with my wife, and we are substantially successful. Sometimes, however, we are less than successful. When we encounter failure in communication, we don’t give up and decide not to bother to communicate any more. Instead, we live with partial success. The result is neither perfect, nor is it a failure.

    Readers of this essay will understand it, some better than others. If someone misunderstands a portion of it, I won’t give up and decide that publishing essays of this nature is useless; I expect that some people will misunderstand. Based on e-mails I get, especially in response to material I post on Bible translation, I suspect that some people’s misunderstanding is even intentional. Sometimes when I read my own material a few weeks later, I wonder how it was that I successfully communicated anything at all! The results are considerably less than perfect, but nonetheless they serve a purpose.

    In Bible study, the problem is made worse by the complexity of some interpretation problems. Despite the impression one gets from public debate, there is much about the Bible that a broad range of scholars can agree on. In general, the historical meaning, the meaning intended by the original author for his original audience, produces the best consensus. This does not by any means suggests that everyone agrees on everything at this level; I’m simply saying that the agreement is much broader than is often thought. When interpretation gets closer to application, what a piece of scripture means in our daily lives, the differences are much greater. Application is impacted by one’s theology which involves one’s tradition or the tradition of one’s church. Some students of scripture do not believe that there is any real applicability beyond that of any ordinary piece of literature, while others believe that scriptural commands can be almost directly applied to one’s daily life.

    The elements that go into this sort of application are much more subjective than those that go into the historical understanding. Nonetheless they are not totally obscure, and they can be examined. In fact, many heated arguments about scripture occur simply because one person doesn’t bother to check the basic assumptions of the other. When I get into a discussion, or heaven forbid, an argument, I frequently ask just how one goes about applying scripture. What do they think the process involves? Sometimes folks claim that they really aren’t interpreting; they’re just doing what the Bible says. But that is the opposite of “just your interpretation;” it suggests that someone has perfect understanding of scripture. Usually you will find in discussion that there is, in fact, a considerable amount of unacknowledged interpretation going on.

    In discussions of scriptural interpreation, there is great value in examining the process. It’s not nitpicking, wasting time, or trying to put the other person down. In fact, it can often bring understanding from otherwise heated debates.

    Remember:

    • It is your interpretation
    • Each writer and speaker means something
    • Communication doesn’t have to be perfect to be adequate
    • Examining your process of interpretation and application can result in improved understanding, even if not in agreement

    For more on my own view of interpretation see: Understanding the Participatory Study Method.