Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Bible Study Method

  • Geoffrey Lentz on Wesleyan Bible Study

    Geoffrey Lentz on Wesleyan Bible Study

    On Thursday I had the privilege of interviewing Rev. Geoffrey Lentz, pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola, regarding characteristics Bible study in the Wesleyan tradition.

    Geoffrey and I have known one another for many years, and authored a book, Learning and Living Scripture, which was published, well, a long time ago. As Geoffrey pointed out in the interview, “Back then, Henry, even you were young.”

    In this video we reference the new imprint, New Fire Press, and two new authored or co-authored by Geoffrey, Bold to Say: Learning and Living the Lord’s Prayer and Project Nebo: Empowering the Generations. Energion Publications (my company) produces this artistically and editorially independent imprint.

    Here’s the video:

    (Featured image combines book covers with an image generated by Adobe’s Firefly Image 3.)

    Project Nebo
    Bold to Say
  • 1 Peter 2:1-2 – Pure Milk

    1 Peter 2:1-2 – Pure Milk

    1 So putting aside all evil and every kind of deceit and hypocrisy and jealousy and all slander, 2 like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, so that you might grow into salvation.

    1 Peter 2:1-2 (my translation)

    This verse is sometimes contrasted with Hebrews 5:13 where the recipients of the letter are chided for not being mature, for needing milk rather than solid food. The two verses are talking about rather different things, however, and thus one should take each metaphor on its own terms, even though “milk” is involved in both.

    After seeing each separately, however, I think there are some lessons to be learned from bringing the two points together. So I’m going to look at that.

    First, the term translated “spiritual” is not usually translated that way, though in this particular verse a wide variety of translations render it as such. I wanted to find a different word, but after looking at it for a while, I couldn’t find a good alternative, and thus bowed to the majority. Perhaps translation committees have made similar searches.

    The word translated here as “spiritual” is also used in Romans 12:1, where it is rendered in a variety of other ways, generally centered around the idea of “acceptable” or “appropriate.” I would like to combine the ideas of “thoughtful,” “logically appropriate,” and “spiritual” into one word in order to translate it well for this context, but I don’t know any word that does that.

    The point of the verse, however, is clear if you look carefully at the context. The meaning of words is determined by the context. This should be a warning against the process of looking in a Greek lexicon or in Strong’s or another concordance keyed to Greek words, and then trying to force one of the definitions into the verse you’re reading.

    In this case, this “spiritual” milk is longed for and taken as nourishment when we put aside all the evil and deceit.

    This reminds me of a military aphorism: In war, most things are simple, but never easy.

    In our spiritual life, the answer can be rather simple, but it never easy.

    Let’s read that into this verse. If we could put away evil, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander, we’d be able to get to that appropriate, acceptable, logical, and spiritual milk. And not only all those things, but pure!

    Now go ahead. Get rid of all of those things from your life.

    Unless you keep deceit–self-deceit–you’ll realize that may be simple, but definitely not easy. Or even possible.

    Yes, if we could just stop deceiving ourselves, we’d be able to get to that pure, nourishing milk. It’s a simple, and hard, as that.

    But Peter isn’t leaving us there. How are we going to get there? Peter, pretty good at messing things up himself, isn’t leaving you there. “If you have tasted that Christ is good” (v3), and if you’ve done that, Christ is going to the the cornerstone.

    There it is. The one and only way to get to this is through Christ. And this is why we have to go back to the basic and simple. One of my authors wrote that there was one way, and only one way to tell if a doctrine is a Christian doctrine, and that was whether it was centered in Christ.

    And that’s where we are right now. People often, with some validity, relate this to the study of scripture. When I identify errors in biblical interpretation, particularly my own, they usually come down to my desire for the text to say something other than what it does. Scripture is not that easy to understand, and the more we look at the big picture, the more difficult it gets. How do all these things fit together?

    It’s so easy to take my agenda, my desires, and put the pieces of the puzzle together in such a way that it pleases me. The deceit involves is most often self-deceit. Self-deceit will corrupt everything you try to understand.

    And that’s where we have to go back to the foundation, in Peter’s words, the cornerstone. Living cornerstone. The question is whether the interpretation you’re creating fits with that living cornerstone.

    Now a short note: I’m speaking hear ultimately about application. A historical understanding of a passage as it would have been heard by those who heard it first is important, and is generally achieved by good historical methodology. But how that applies to my life and the life of the church today requires greater discernment, and this passage provides the basis for this.

    Now let’s relate this to Hebrews 5:13, and the need for solid food. I think it’s a good idea to put the two things together. Getting the pure milk of the word, which results from keeping our eyes on The Living Cornerstone, is a critical foundation. It is also a foundation you can’t cover up as you go on to higher things. If you forget the basics, you’re not going anywhere good.

    At the same time, we are challenged to grow, to get to the solid food, to build up. One of my concerns with Christian education is that we tend to cycle and recycle the same material over and over again. We don’t behave as though we expect anyone to grow and to go on to more advanced material. We’re stuck on the basics.

    Often, we’re stuck on the basics because we aren’t getting the basics. Putting our eyes on Christ is basic, and if we aren’t getting that, more advanced things will tend to get scattered across the landscape. We get into vain arguments when we forget the basics.

    So rather than being contradictory to Hebrews 5:13, the concepts of 1 Peter 2:1-2 are foundational to it. They provide the only path there is to more solid food that doesn’t involve falling back into self-deceit.

    As you read, or meditate, or talk with your Lord today, keep this question in mind: Am I building on the Cornerstone? Is this a fit living stone to put into my structure?

    Let Christ be the center of every thought and act.

  • Dr TK Dunn on the Importance of the Old Testament

    This is an extract from a longer interview, which I will also embed. I think Dr. Dunn has some valuable comments on the relationship of scripture and what it means for our study.

    And here’s the full interview from which that was extracted.

  • The Danger of Serious Bible Study

    The Danger of Serious Bible Study

    I believe it’s important to study the Bible. Many approaches are useful in this, and I’ve discussed them elsewhere. But the idea of serious Bible study can become a problem.

    I’m sure some readers are scratching their heads. How can it possibly be a problem to study the Bible seriously? Isn’t that obviously the right thing to do. Well, yes and no. Yes, if you understand serious Bible study to involve a variety of approaches that help you get an overview as well as deal with details. No, if by serious you mean spending hours over each word or phrase and never getting beyond looking at the text under a microscope.

    It’s important to do fast reading, so as to get a good overview. It’s important to read multiple texts. These days I’m listening to the Bible using Audible as I walk on my treadmill. Now one thing I can tell you is that it’s very easy for me to get distracted and miss things. It’s also hard for me to remember where things are because I’m listening and not seeing chapter and verse numbers. It’s also impossible for me to stop and go over some little item over and over rather than continuing to get the big picture.

    Do I miss some things? Certainly. But I also see some things that I wouldn’t see if I was reading directly from the Hebrew text, for example.

    Once at a table in a church office I was reading from the Contemporary English Version, a translation designed primarily for those for whom English is a second language. It’s easy reading. Someone stopped to see what I was reading and immediately asked, “Why would you read that when you can read Greek?”

    The answer was simple. Because I read English approximately 4x as fast as I read Greek. It’s easier for me to get an overview of an entire book and also of the entire Bible.

    I once set about to see how quickly I could read the entire Bible. I had a great deal of work, but I’m a reader and almost always have some book. I simply decided that when I wanted to read it would be the Bible until I had completed it. I finished it in about 10 days. Again, people would ask why. Surely I couldn’t give the text the attention it deserved.

    My answer would be that while reading slowly and agonizing over each detail, you can’t give the overall picture the attention it deserves.

    Right now I’m writing daily meditations on one verse per day from Psalm 119. Thus I read one verse and then spend the day on it. That’s not quite the opposite extreme, because I’m meditating on it through my work day, not spending hours working through lexicons and commentaries. But it’s close. That’s also an important part of Bible study.

    Each verse has a context. Too often we regard that as the verse before and the verse after or something similar. But that verse resides in a section of a book that might or might not be equal to a chapter, and that section resides in a book. That book is part of our canon of scripture, and we can see that canon divided into different sections. Is this among the wisdom books, the prophets, history? That is also context.

    Because the Bible was given to the community of faith, we also have to look at the entire canon of scripture and what a particular text means in that canonical context.

    “Seriously” in this context means at every level from every angle in every possible way. There is no one way. If we think the scriptures represent God’s word, a message from God to God’s people, then it’s rather important. If you don’t believe that, it’s another matter. But if you believe that “seriously” is very, very serious indeed!

    So read your Bible fast or slow or anything in between. Spend hours on a single verse of minutes on a whole chapter. Try to combine these and get a picture of what God’s word is in your mind so as you look at a verse, you see it fitting into a larger picture automatically because you are so well acquainted with that larger picture.

    You’ll be rewarded!

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Link: Revelation, We Have a Problem

    Link: Revelation, We Have a Problem

    Scot McKnight discusses the problem with the popular understanding of Revelation.

    I recall guest teaching a Sunday School class on Revelation from the study guide I wrote (currently not available as I revise it). The major question from the class was when I was going to talk about the seven-year tribulation and whether I was pre, mid, or post-trib. When I said, “None of the above,” they still insisted that I teach a session on the tribulation.

    Note that I believe there will be time(s) of trouble, what I do not believe in is the seven year tribulation and rapture separate from the second coming.

    The revisions of my study guide include illustrations and putting a bit more explanation rather than just scripture and study questions, which was my original approach. I prefer studying scripture directly as much as possible. For a marketable study guide, I need a bit more explanation.

    In the meantime, check out Scot McKnight’s notes.

  • The Wrath of the Lamb

    The Wrath of the Lamb

    Sometimes the process of preparing to teach Sunday School takes interesting turns, at least for me.

    I’m currently teaching from the Sermon on the Mount, and I was thinking about the transition from the beatitudes to the discussion of fulfilling the law. Sometimes we get so used to the way Scripture passages read that we don’t really notice the impact they would have had. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness …” transitions to “unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.” We’re used to thinking of Pharisees as bad guys, and we can immediately translate that statement mentally into something less than it would have been to those who first heard it.

    It’s easy to suggest that the Sermon on the Mount does not represent some singular sermon, and that perhaps the beatitudes and the teaching on the law contained in Chapter 5 weren’t really run together that way when Jesus taught them. Indeed, the different settings for portions of the sermon in Luke might suggest that we have compilations of sayings rather than complete sermons.

    But, and it’s an important ‘but’, someone thought these two things went together. I love form, source, and redaction criticism and believe they provide important insights, allowing us to learn from the prehistory of the text in front of us, but in a case like this, they just kick the ball down the field a bit. We still should ask just why the passages go together.

    Let me skip my own answer, which I already had in mind, and go with the experience of thinking about the passage. I like to read what I’m going to teach very early, usually the Sunday afternoon after the previous lesson, and then think about it through the week.

    In this case, I had just gotten a new audio Bible (NRSV) for Audible (unfortunately it is no longer available). I wasn’t actually intending to think about the passage, and I just let the audiobook continue from where I had last left it, which happened to be in Revelation 6. I got to 6:16, and heard the words “the wrath of the lamb.” Or “hide us … from the wrath of the lamb.”

    Now here’s another phrase that doesn’t always have full impact. It takes on that “scriptury” sense in which we imbue it with holiness and piously let the jarring nature of the statement slip by.

    So picture a cute, wooly, harmless lamb. Now picture crowds of people calling for mountains or large rocks to fall on them — splat! — to save them from the wrath of, well, that fluffy bundle of cuteness. For Monty Python fans, let me note that it calls to my mind vorpal bunnies.

    So we go back a bit in Scripture to Revelation 5:5-6:

    (5) One of the elders said to me: ‘Do not weep; the Lion from the tribe of Judah, the shoot growing from David’s stock, has won the right to open the scroll and its seven seals.’ (6) Then I saw a Lamb with the marks of sacrifice on him …

    Revelation 5:5-6a

    I could spend all kinds of time on this, but I’m just looking at one thing: The Lion is the Lamb. Of course, if you read the texts I first reference in context, you’d also note that the fear of the wrath of the lamb was combined with fear of the one sitting on the throne.

    In this case, we have a direct literary relationship. In chapter 6, John is doubtlessly connecting referencing this lamb, who is also not just a, but the Lion. Slightly more intimidating than the wooly lamb I evoked earlier.

    So this turned my mind to something I get from orthodox theology, in this case the incarnation. Jesus is presented as totally human and totally divine. Compare Hebrews 2:17-18 to Hebrews 7:26-28 display a combination of incompatible features. One plus one equals one. Not normal logic.

    I like to distinguish belief in three ways. There is believing that. One can believe that something is true without absorbing it or responding to it. I believe that an aircraft is airworthy and safe, but I stay on the ground. Then there is believing in. In this case belief leads to a trust in the thing in which we believe. I believe that the aircraft is airworthy and safe, so assuming the crew is good as well, I get on board and fly. Then there is believing through. That is when I use one belief to impact the way I understand and respond to other things. In the case of the aircraft analogy I now learn to put reasonable trust in things in which it is reasonable to have confidence.

    In Christian terms, I go from believing that Jesus rose from the dead, to putting my trust in “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith,” and from there to living a life defined by not just by the hope of the resurrection but of the character and power combined of one who gave himself to death and arose. There is some room here to live in hope. The hope comes from seeing other things in the light of my belief in the resurrection.

    Now back to the incarnation, and lions, and lambs.

    There are many things that thinking conditioned (transformed?) by the incarnation can be, many of them at the same time. One is that we lose the binary sense. To take us back to Revelation 5, we can see in one person the Lion and the Lamb. We can see gentleness and sacrifice on the one hand and wrath on the other, all in the form of a wooly lamb, one that someone already sacrificed. That’s seeing these things through our belief in an orthodox doctrine. I have heard folks argue forcefully for an orthodox statement of doctrine, but seeing it only as a thing that must be affirmed to be true, and not something that impacts the rest of our lives.

    I maintain rather that if you really believe in something like the incarnation, it will reshape your thinking all over the place. Constantly. Irrevocably.

    I recall hearing Deanna Thompson, author of the Deuteronomy volume in the Belief Commentary series. She is a feminist and a liberationist. She recalled wondering why she should be the one to write a commentary on Deuteronomy. But she said that as she wrote the commentary, she realized that “a God without wrath will never liberate anybody.” A God such as the one presented in Deuteronomy.

    The Lamb is the Lion. They are not incompatible.

    And then another thing came to mind. I recently watched the movie “Aristocats” again. It’s a favorite of mine. It includes a song with the line:

    Everybody! Everybody! Everybody wants to be a cat!

    Aristocats

    At this point I imagine you’re thinking I’m a bit odd in the things I connect. I also assure you that I like cats.

    But if you look around church, everybody wants to be a cat. That is, we want to get to the Lion part of the act, or the rider on the white horse. We long (as the readers of Revelation did) for the avenging God who does nice things for the good guys (surely this includes us!) and gets all the bad guys. If possible, we want to skip over all the lamblike stuff, and definitely that “slain” stuff.

    So I wind back toward my original topic again, as I know you’re wondering what all of this has to do with Matthew 5? And indeed, in listening to Revelation I had every intention of not working on my Sunday School lesson.

    But Matthew 5 challenges us in a similar way. Jesus is here both the lamb who has humbled himself and is living as one of us, the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” and also the one who says our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees (remember that the audience would see that as a high standard), that we must be perfect, and that even being angry or insulting a brother can lead to hell.

    The Lamb is the Lion. Love and wrath work together. It’s not either-or, but both and.

    Featured image by Catherine Stockinger from Pixabay

  • Link: Bible Criticism – A Common Sense Approach to the Bible

    This article is quite helpful in understanding what biblical criticism is, how it is helpful, and also how it may be threatening to some.

    Here’s a quote:

    The basic point, however, is an important one: until we know what kind of material we are dealing with, we don’t know what questions it is sensible to expect it to answer for us.

    TheTorah.com

    Read the rest and enjoy!

  • Choose Your Shape!

    Choose Your Shape!

    Well, perhaps, “choosing” should be “recognizing.” Weird? Doesn’t make sense? Read on!

    In the late 1990s I participated in a program here in Escambia County called CommUNITY Dialogues, led by a creative and interesting communications specialist (and I had not, up to that time, used “creative” or “interesting” with regard to such people!) named Dr. Dolly Berthelot.

    It was a great program, and I learned a great deal. The reason I’m writing about it, however, is that it was the first diversity training program I’d experienced that I considered personally valuable.

    While I valued and value diversity, I felt that many interfaith and diversity programs negated their own value by asking people to give up their own beliefs on entry. The result was a debate largely centered around whether divesting oneself of one’s own “diverse” views was a good idea or not.

    What Dr. Dolly did was invite us to explore our beliefs and those of others and to look at ways in which we could understand one another and work together by celebrating and taking advantage of our differences. I have always believed that this would be valuable, but in my experience people of strong convictions tend toward excluding others, and those advocating diversity want to diminish the value of one’s own values.

    You may, in fact, decide to change your belief on some topic as a result of dialogue, but eliminating the differences before they are experienced and understood is, in my view, suboptimal. (I like that word!)

    I say all of this to bring us to the present, and some of the work of Dr. Dolly Berthelot. I publish her book PERFECTLY SQUARE™, and I have spent some time looking at a training program she has developed, SELFSHAPES™. She has developed a simple quiz based on this program, and I have implemented it on our web site.

    I’m not going to discuss it in detail here, because it is best experienced first. I have commented before that I have found things I’ve learned about human nature, including sociology and psychology, and definitely about different personality characteristics more helpful in Bible study and teaching than learning biblical languages. (I in no way regret learning the languages. I say this to emphasize the extreme value of learning to understand people for biblical studies and theology.)

    And, of course, for life.

    So head on over to the Energion Publications retail site and check out the quiz. It’s called Dr. Dolly’s SELFSHAPES™. There are no pop-ups, and very little advertising. At the end we offer you the opportunity to share on social media and to sign up for an e-newsletter to keep up with developments.

    Enjoy!

  • The Limitations of Word Studies

    The Limitations of Word Studies

    It’s a common question, but it’s one I don’t like: What does that Greek word really mean? (You can substitute Hebrew or Aramaic for Greek.)

    The basic problem is the assumption that a word “really” means anything specific. Underlying this is a tendency to think that one discovers the meaning of a communication by mentally finding the meaning of the individual words and then adding them together. Language isn’t that simple.

    In English, we see this in appeals to the dictionary when word meanings are concerned. “The dictionary says that word means ____, so that’s it.” I have encountered great frustration when I don’t find that the final answer. But the way we use dictionary definitions can help us with understanding definitions in biblical languages.

    A look in the dictionary will help at this point. You’ll notice that the definitions of words come in groups, and that there are multiple possibilities. If you have definitions 1, 2, and 3, which one applies to your particular case? I’ve seen angry debates occur because the participants were using a different, valid definition for a particular word. Valid, that is, apart from the particular context.

    How do you know which one to use? The answer is context. Your dictionary is not written as a form of sacred writ, derived from some mountaintop revelation and delivered on unalterable tablets. Lexicographers study the ways in which words and used and then develop definitions that reflect those uses. The meaning is determined by the way words are used. Even what words get the official status of being in the dictionary is determined by usage. Who uses them? Where? Are they slang, or have they become part of mainstream languages. Lexicographers debate this sort of things, sometimes quite vigorously.

    Now you need to avoid the reverse problem. This doesn’t mean that words can mean whatever you want them to. Well, they can, but not if you want to be able to communicate with someone else. Language is social, which is why lexicographers look at the way people use the words.

    Words in the Bible behave as words do anywhere else. While we may debate the working of inspiration in the choosing of the words, it is clear that they are there to communicate with humans. These words function as human language.

    So when I’m asked what a Hebrew or Greek word “really” means, I need to know where it is in the text so I can ask who is using it, when it is used, and what the various elements of context are. The Bible was written and transmitted over many centuries. If we take the oldest suggested dates for elements of the text, this history covers more than a millenium and a half. Many of those dates are debatable, but the time period is fairly long. Try reading something written in English in the 15th century CE (make sure it hasn’t had its language updated) and see how hard it can be to understand. Then be aware that the biblical languages underwent similar changes over time.

    One way we learn how to guess and then remember words is etymology. A word is derived from one or more other words, and we combine the meanings to determine what the word means in its current form.

    This procedure is helpful in guessing the meaning of a new word and in remembering meaning, but it doesn’t determine the meaning. That is because words develop in meaning as they are used. A favorite of New Testament teachers is the Greek ekklesia, which is derived from the words for “out” and “called.” I don’t intend to run through the history here, but that meaning is at best very doubtful for uses in the New Testament. The word has developed in meaning, and now refers to the gathering of believers.

    Another technique that has been applied to that particular word is a search for historical meanings. An ekklesia could, historically, be a legislative assembly, but there is no evidence of this usage in the New Testament. My point here is not to develop a “correct” interpretation of this word, but rather to point out that such a result must ultimately result from reading the texts of the church that use the term.

    What can a word study do for understanding the text in that case? Is it a waste of time?

    Hardly! It is no more a waste of time than lexicography is. What word studies can do is discover the range of meanings a word may have. A good word study would find different contexts, different categories of use, and appropriate examples. That’s one of the differences between a good dictionary or lexicon and a vocabulary guide.

    Strong’s concordance, for example, is a vocabulary guide. (With questionable content in many cases.) It provides a general survey of the English words used to translate a particular term in a particular Bible version, not a good range of definitions. It’s a challenging tool to use for word studies. A good Bible app with search, or a good concordance of a text will make it much easier.

    Similarly etymology doesn’t tell you what a word really means. Rather, it provides some options for what a word may mean. That’s why we have a named fallacy, the etymological fallacy, which refers to the improper use of cognate words as determining meaning.

    Debates about linguistics and biblical languages were in a much earlier stage when I was studying, but I was able to observe this in connection with using Ugaritic. Ugaritic is a Semitic language that is closely related to Hebrew, but definitely not identical. After five years of Hebrew it was easy for me to learn.

    At the same time there was a temptation to use Ugaritic to determine the meaning of obscure Hebrew words, as well as to determine the meaning of unknown or obscure Ugaritic words from Hebrew. The latter was necessary. The language was an unknown, and we had to start from what was known.

    In both cases, however, we had to watch for the problem of letting something other than the context determine the meaning. Words in Hebrew, Akkadian, Aramaic, and Arabic (among others) could give us a range of possibilities, but we had to work to interpret the text in order to get a good definition of a word in a particular context. (No, I was not one of the folks who interpreted these texts initially. My professor encouraged us to walk in those steps to develop our own skills.)

    Thus the etymology, parallel languages, and summaries of word uses (word studies) all contributed to understanding, but none of them determined the meaning. That involved understanding the context.

    Now suppose we’re looking at a New Testament word. What goes into determining the meaning of a word in a particular text? You need the known options. You also have to consider that a creative author can re-purpose an existing word. You need to understand the passage not just as a matter of the definitions of the words in the local context, but in terms of the author’s overall message. You could add to all these contexts a theological context.

    Then you have to ask whether the author always uses the same word in the same sense. As an example, I suggest reading Romans 1-9 (if not further) carefully, looking at how Paul nuances the use of the word “law.” If you don’t watch his dance with that word, you will have a hard time coming up with a definition that will work. If you try to force something on the text from the outside, then you will miss what Paul is actually saying.

    One of the negative results of studying biblical languages is that one can develop a tendency to study only the nuts and bolts. You spend so much time on specific words and even phrases or idioms that you lose site of the passage and its message.

    That sort of careful study is essential. It provides the foundation for understanding. All comments about words not having singular, specific meanings should not give us the idea that we can do anything we want.

    But once that sort of work is done, we have step back and read more rapidly, hearing the message in its broader sense.

    In turn, we go back to the nuts and bolts and see if we understand them differently now that we’ve seen the overview.

    Difficult? Time consuming? It can be. Yet each step you take builds your understanding of the text.

    For more on word studies, see my post on Word Study Dangers, starting with Word Study Reprise, which links to the rest.

  • Above and Below: Thoughts on Exodus 32

    Above and Below: Thoughts on Exodus 32

    Yesterday I taught the Sunday School lesson for my class. The primary scripture was Exodus 32, the story of the golden calf. Our Adult Bible Studies title for the lesson was “The Permission Trap” and the goal was “To recognize the consequences of giving ourselves permission to do that which we know to be wrong.”

    In one sense, one can’t argue with that. The Israelites knew they shouldn’t be making an idol, and that is precisely what happened, Aaron’s claim to miraculous sourcing notwithstanding. (Have you ever thought, “I know nobody is going to believe this, but I need some excuse”?) The Israelites did sin, and there were consequences for their sin.

    The question in my mind as I read the lesson was whether this is actually the intended message. No, let me be honest here. I pretty much disagreed with that as the primary message.

    It’s quite possible for something to be true on one level and to miss the mark when one goes deeper. The point here is not to say that making calves is OK, but rather that the message is somewhat deeper than “Remember not to make golden calves.” When interpreting stories, I would suggest that finding the moral (or a moral) of the story is not the point at which you have found the meaning. In fact, finding that moral can often prevent you from truly learning from the story.

    To lead into this, let me note one Christian reaction, which is to blame the Israelites for being so faithless while imagining that we would do better. I would imagine that people who think this way have either spent very little time in the wilderness, or even in campsites, or they have ignored their own behavior. People who get away from their normal source of food and other supplies tend to get nervous. So the idea that the Israelites were faithless while we would be faithful involves looking at our own characters through rose-colored glasses.

    That rosy view of our own characters also results from seeing only the surface problem. We cannot imagine ourselves constructing a golden calf and then dancing around it. We think we could avoid that. Unfortunately, our idolatry often takes less work-intensive forms.

    To lead in from another direction (anything to avoid getting to the subject!), let me note that I read from Brevard Childs’ commentary on Exodus. Childs is one of my favorite commentaries, up in the top three. He goes through some of the source and redaction critical ideas on the chapter and does an excellent job as always. He points to some critical aspects of what the chapter teaches based on some of the “problems” certain people have noted in the text.

    In an aside about the aside, Childs is a foremost, if not the foremost, advocate of canonical criticism. Canonical criticism involves seeing a passage as part of the whole canon of scripture. By nature, it can make a text look different depending on your religious tradition and view of the canon. For example, Jewish and Roman Catholic interpreters are working from a different canon of scripture than one another and than protestants. I would say that Jacob Milgrom does the best job of seeing the canonical picture from different perspectives. His own perspective is that of a conservative Rabbi, but he looks at usage and interpretation in other traditions.

    In practice, scripture comes to us a part of a canon, whether that is the canon of our religious tradition or perhaps of our own making. We will read differently based on the setting in which we place the book. I will read a passage differently myself if I’m trying to understand Israel as an ancient near eastern people, Judaism as a faith, Christianity, or simply looking at a document as a piece of literature. I think we do well to be aware of all of those and I personally don’t privilege one or another point of view. (I would comment Edward W. H. Vick’s book From Inspiration to Understanding: Reading the Bible Seriously and Faithfully on this topic, particularly section 2, Canon.)

    For my Sunday School class, I looked from the canonical view, and that leads me to think that the calf itself was an instance, a symptom, and not the underlying problem. I think the text is arranged to emphasize that.

    Note, for example, that after we have the introductory story we begin and end dealing with the results on the mountain. In verse seven, YHWH tells Moses about the peoples’ failure. The conversation between YHWH and Moses goes on through verse 14, at which point YHWH repents (more on this in a moment). In verse 31 Moses returns to the mountain for a conversation about the same topic again.

    The thinking on the mountain and the thinking at the foot of the mountain are quite different. The people are impatient with God’s timing. Moses doesn’t seem to realize that so much time has passed. This is a good place to put yourself in the shoes of the people at the foot of the mountain. Supposing you are climbing a mountain with a guide. The guide tells you to wait in the based camp while he goes away for some purpose. It could be supplies. It could be information. It doesn’t matter. If the guide doesn’t return in good time, what do you do?

    Consider that you have no way of knowing where the guide is. He might have fallen over a cliff. He might have been killed by a wild animal. He might even have gotten lost. If any of those things occurred, and you keep waiting in camp, you could wait until you die. How long do you wait before you move out and try to save yourself? Your life could depend on accuracy.

    Yet the meeting on the mountaintop moves at its own pace and the Israelites have to wonder. It’s Moses who has done everything. (We can remember, from the comfort of our easy chairs, that Moses was the agent of God’s action, but to the people, it looks like Moses.) Moses met with Pharaoh and announced the plagues. Moses stretched out his rod over the Red Sea. Moses announced the Manna. Moses struck the rock and brought water. And now Moses is gone.

    Be honest! How long do you wait?

    Moses hears what God has to say, and God proposes destroying the people. I don’t want to go into detail about this conversation, except to note that this is often the time when we get into debates about foreknowledge, predestination, and whether God can repent. I would suggest those debates don’t go well in this story. Let the story be the story.

    Consider: If God is at least as intelligent as an ordinary human, don’t you think he’d know what reaction Moses would have at this point? We don’t have to settle issues of theology and philosophy to understand that God is making a point, and that the storyteller is making points about God and about Moses. Even a God without foreknowledge would know the outcome of this conversation.

    We make this point of God’s faithfulness before we hear about what Moses did in the camp. There are consequences and results of my actions, yet neither my actions nor those consequences cause God to be unfaithful. This is stated before Moses goes down to deal with the people.

    Let me compare this to someone who gets drunk and falls off of a cliff. This behavior was perhaps sub-optimal. Can God forgive? I think doubtless God does. But the body is still lying broken at the bottom of the cliff.

    In Israel’s case, God can forgive the unfaithfulness, but behaving in an unfaithful manner has results. Let me put that into my own perspective. I tend to worry about money. When one problem is solved, I immediately find another one. Since I run a business with many bills, and in many cases narrow margins, I can always find a bill to worry about. Many bills have been paid. God can forgive me for being a worrier, and yet I will suffer the health effects of sleeplessness and tension.

    The Israelites have a simple problem. It’s said that in war (and I suggest everything else) most tasks are simple, but are very hard to accomplish. After this event, for example, would be the story of the spies and the decision to turn back. Faithlessness breeds trouble.

    Moses takes visible action in the camp. I can’t say that I’m in love with his procedure, but he is, after all, Moses, and I’m so not. Visible, human inflicted consequences can have a substantial impact on behavior. Behavior can be important in many ways. I see no contradiction here between God’s faithfulness expressed on the mountaintop and Moses’ actions taking control of a camp that was very much out of control.

    And then we have the final, enigmatic statement. After the next debate with God on the mountaintop, we are told that God punished the people. We are not told when and we are not told how.

    My suspicion is that faithlessness has its own punishment built in. I gain nothing and lose much by worrying. That’s how things work. For punishment to occur, all that is required is for God to continue being God, and maintaining the universe.

    As a final note, I want to look at the basis of God’s grace and faithfulness. In verse 13, Moses appeals to the promise God had made to the patriarchs. There are those who hold that in this passage Moses is calling up the collective and collected merit of the patriarchs. Because of their merit, God should show grace to God’s people now.

    There is no indication of such a thought in this text. It is not the merit of the patriarchs to which Moses appeals. Rather, it is God’s promise, God’s oath, sworn on himself to those patriarchs. That is why the appeal is precisely what works. It is an appeal to something solid and firm, the faithfulness of God who promised.

    One can look through this story for the details of what was done wrong, and there is plenty of that. But the ultimate failure, and I know my ultimate failure, is that I lose trust. It’s the sin that underlies the sins, sin “living in me” (Romans 7:17).

    I’d rather deal with the sins because I can measure them, count them, and even deal with them in some sense. How many times was I angry today? Can I be angry fewer times tomorrow? It sounds doable. But under it all, there is that sin, which is not one I can deal with myself.

    That requires the One on the mountaintop.

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