Making Sense of the Old Testament : Three Crucial Questions

by Longman, Tremper, III

• ISBN13: 9780801058288
• ISBN10: 0801058287
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Baker Academic

Summary

A noted biblical scholar explores three questions Christians often ask about the Old Testament and provides answers that are both satisfying and understandable.

Author Biography

Tremper Longman III is professor of Old Testament at Westmont College.

Table of Contents

Editors' Preface	p. 9
Author's Preface	p. 11
What Are the Keys to Understanding the Old Testament?	p. 13
Is the God of the Old Testament also the God of the New Testament?	p. 55
How Is the Christian to Apply the Old Testament to Life?	p. 103
Notes	p. 137
Recommended Reading	p. 143
Scripture Index	p. 145
Subject Index	p. 149
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

What Are the Keys to Understanding the Old Testament?

An Overview of Old Testament Study: Attractions and Obstacles

    The Attractions of the Old Testament

1. Gripping Stories

    In my travels and correspondence, I see that Christians have an increasing interest in the Old Testament. While, in my opinion, we still don't spend enough time studying and reflecting on God's revelation before the coming of Jesus, I am extremely excited to observe that people are turning to the Hebrew Bible to learn more about God and more about a godly life.

    A variety of factors have been attracting Christians to the Old Testament lately. Prominent among them are its gripping stories. We love stories. A good story can hold our attention for hours. We will stay rooted in a chair as we listen to someone tell a story or as we read a good book.

    The Old Testament is a repository of varied stories about the most fascinating people. As we begin in Genesis, we encounter the story of Abraham's physical journey from Ur of the Chaldees to the Promised Land and of his developing relationship with God. We read about Joseph, cast into a pit by his brothers, rising to a position of great prominence in Egypt, and saving his family, the people of God, from death by starvation. Next comes Exodus with its tales of Moses and the burning bush, the ten plagues, and the crossing of the Red Sea. The list goes on and on: Joshua and Jericho; Samson and Delilah; David and Goliath; Elijah and Elisha; Ezra and Nehemiah. These stories stimulate our imaginations and evoke deep emotions.

    As we read Old Testament stories, we encounter not only spellbinding plots, but vivid characters. We do not get modern-style biographies in the Bible, but we do find character portraits. We have an intuitive understanding that these character portraits are given to us to help us navigate life. Paul in fact explicitly tells us that that is their purpose. In 1 Corinthians 10:1-11 he recalls to mind some significant events from Old Testament history and then offers a generalization: "These events happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as [our ancestors] did or worship idols as some of them did" (vv. 6-7). Among the more potent warnings is the account of the disastrous consequences of Solomon's marriages to foreign wives (1 Kings). His transformation from the wisest of all kings to a fool who brings down the kingdom is a solemn caution against godless entanglements.

    In addition to warnings, the Old Testament narratives present us with ideals to emulate. Daniel and his three friends serve as an extraordinary example of faith during persecution. When cast into the furnace, the three friends trusted God even though they knew they might be roasted alive. Listen to their testimony to Nebuchadnezzar: "We do not need to defend ourselves before you. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us. He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn't, Your Majesty can be sure that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up" (Dan. 3:16-18). These Old Testament stories have additional punch because they are true. We can learn much from fiction, but our attention is riveted by historical characters and events that actually happened.

2. Heart-wrenching Poems

    But there is more to the Old Testament than stories. A good portion of the Old Testament is poetic. Poetry in ancient Hebrew, as in most other literary traditions, is compressed language, saying a lot in only a few words. Poetry is particularly appealing because it so obviously addresses us as whole people. It is not interested just in informing our intellects, but in evoking our emotions, stimulating our imaginations, and influencing our wills.

    The Psalms have been a perpetual favorite among Christians. Throughout church history the Psalms have been used as sources for hymns, as encouragements to prayer life, and as corporate responsive readings. These poems, the expressions of their authors' intense emotions, never make concrete (except perhaps in their titles) the particular situation that gave rise to their joy or sorrow. The historical nonspecificity of the Psalms renders them an appropriate vehicle for community worship. In other words, later worshipers can appropriate the Psalms for their own prayers and mold the words to fit their own situation. We in effect become the "I" of the psalm.

    John Calvin observed that as we pray or sing a psalm, that psalm serves as a mirror of our soul: "What various and resplendent riches are contained in this treasure, it were difficult to find words to describe.... I have been wont to call this book, not inappropriately, an anatomy of all parts of the soul; for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror." Just as a physical mirror reflects our physical appearance, the Psalms afford us a look into our soul. If we feel at one with the psalmist as he expresses his love for God, then we know that our relationship with God is strong. On the other hand, we may find that Psalm 130, which begins, "From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help," better expresses what we feel. The latter is typical of the lament psalms, which reflect disorientation in relationship with the Lord. Such psalms, with only one exception (Ps. 88), point us back to God by concluding with either an expression of confidence in him or a hymn of praise.

3. Images of God

    Christians are also drawn to the Old Testament because we encounter God in its pages. God reveals himself not only to his Old Testament people, but to us who read these accounts millennia later. The first two chapters of the Bible describe God as Creator of the cosmos and the source of human life. After the fall in Genesis 3, God appears in various forms to his chosen people to rescue them from distress, protect them from danger, and inform them of his will. To Abraham he appears as a flaming torch in a smoking pot (Gen. 15:17); to Moses he shows his back (Exod. 33:12-23); to the Israelites in the wilderness God makes his presence known through a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke. These and many other appearances (theophanies) confront the reader with a God of mystery who reveals himself only partially (though truly) to his people.

    God also chooses to reveal himself in the Old Testament through metaphor, which serves the same purpose of preserving the mystery of God. Through imagery God shows himself to his people, while also veiling himself. It is of the nature of metaphor to communicate truly but not precisely. In what way is God like a father? a warrior? a shepherd? a husband?

    Note that most of the metaphors for God that we encounter in the Old Testament are relationship metaphors. God's fatherhood presupposes our sonship. God as a warrior implies that we are soldiers in his army. Since relationship is so crucial to our human experience, we find ourselves drawn to these Old Testament metaphors to understand ourselves.

4. Guidance for Life

    Along the same line, Christians find themselves attracted to the Old Testament in the hope that we might there gain insight into how to navigate life. This expectation accounts for the rise of interest in the law and wisdom literature, particularly the Book of Proverbs, among Christians. We hope to find principles for living that transcend the ancient world to shape our attitudes and behavior today. Some even feel that the Old Testament goes beyond individual guidance to provide a blueprint for society, the basis for a contemporary legal code for a nation that wants to please God.

    5. Background to the New Testament

    The more time one spends in the New Testament, the more one realizes how much of it flows from the Old. That one cannot really understand the New Testament without being steeped in the Old is an inescapable conclusion.

    Why did Jesus have to die? What does Paul mean when he says that Jesus was the second Adam (Rom. 5:12-21)? What is the significance of Jesus' dying just before the Jewish festival of Passover? Why is there so much warfare imagery in the Book of Revelation? Finding the answers to such questions depends in large measure on a thoroughgoing acquaintance with the Old Testament.

    Obstacles to Understanding the Old Testament

    For a host of reasons, then, Christians find themselves reading and studying the Old Testament with eagerness. Both the narratives and the poetry of the Old Testament not only are riveting, but have the potential to transform our lives. They prepare the way for the coming of the Savior, Jesus Christ.

    However, we must also admit that the church's interest in the Old Testament is highly selective. Christians struggle with the Old Testament because they find large parts of it hard to understand and of doubtful relevance to their lives. It is ever so difficult to discipline ourselves to read it regularly. Ministers often avoid preaching from the Old Testament, concentrating on the more obviously relevant New Testament.

    Even when we do make an effort to read the Old Testament, we are often baffled concerning its meaning. Why are we so passionless as we approach this large portion of God's Word? Why do we have such difficulty understanding its message and, perhaps most tellingly of all, its implications for our lives? I would suggest that the Christian community's ambivalence about the Old Testament is the result of more than our sin or our lack of intelligence. The reasons range from the mundane to the theological. Among the major causes of the feeling of distance from the Hebrew Bible are (1) its length, (2) its antiquity, (3) its foreignness, and (4) its place in the history of God's redemption. These four characteristics distance the reader at the beginning of the third millennium A.D. from the Word of God as it was revealed to his ancient people Israel before the coming of Jesus Christ.

1 LENGTH AND DIVERSITY

    Long books are harder to read than short ones even when they are gripping novels. On a recent plane trip I overheard two Tom Clancy fans discussing his new book Executive Orders . They had read all the previous books recounting the exploits of their hero Jack Ryan. This latest volume was exciting enough, but it was over one thousand pages long, and in small print. They were struggling to get through it, but were determined to do so.

    The Old Testament is a long book. Indeed, it constitutes 77 percent of the Bible. Not only is it hard to get through by virtue of its length, but the diversity of the writings also proves a formidable barrier. There are vast differences as one moves from Exodus to Leviticus, for example. The exciting story of the Israelites' release from Egyptian bondage is temporarily suspended for a technical discussion of sacrifices and priests. The story line of the Bible is often interrupted by laws, prophetic oracles, or lyric poetry. Thus it is a hard book to pick up and read from cover to cover. As a result, we find it difficult to get a sense of the whole. We read piecemeal, a psalm here and a chapter of prophecy there.

    Let me take this opportunity to suggest that a frequent obstacle to reading large portions of the Old Testament, and the New for that matter, is the type of translation used by many Christians. Most translations of the Bible lack the compelling literary quality of the original languages. The literal, stilted, and sometimes archaic language which is used in the majority of English translations does not reflect the literary power of the original Hebrew stories and poems. The false notion that literal is more accurate, or that religious language must sound like Shakespearean English, has led to the production of English Bibles that are tedious to read. Please understand that I think literal versions like the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version have an important place in the church and in our study, as do high-style versions like the King James and the New Revised Standard. However, we must also acknowledge that they hinder sustained reading of large portions of Scripture.

2. ANTIQUITY

    In addition to being long, the Hebrew Bible is old, surely older than most books we read. True, the Old Testament is not the oldest writing we have. There are important religious and literary works from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan that predate the earliest portion of the Bible by centuries. Nonetheless, the Bible's antiquity provides a challenge to our understanding.

    We sometimes forget how distanced we are from the Old Testament in terms of date. That is because many of us have grown up with a Bible in the home. Accordingly, we have a sense that it belongs to our time, our era, but that is misguided. The parts of the Old Testament closest to us in time come from no later than 400 B.C., nearly two-and-one-half millennia before we were born. These parts include postexilic works like 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.

    The oldest part of the Hebrew Bible is considerably older than the postexilic works. According to the Bible itself, Moses was the first individual to actually write down divine revelation for posterity. God had revealed himself before the time of Moses, but Moses was the first to inscripturate the revelation. Here arises the problem of when exactly to date Moses. Traditionally, most evangelical scholars have understood the Scriptures (passages like 1 Kings 6:1 provide guidance in this regard)to point to the fifteenth century B.C. for the time of Moses. However, the evidence can possibly be interpreted to indicate a period of time some two centuries later. This is not important for our purposes; it is clear that the earliest portions of the Old Testament were written about one thousand years before the last parts.

    Besides noting the antiquity of the Old Testament, we should be aware of the incredible length of time during which it came into existence. One thousand years is a long, long time. We must keep this vast space of time in mind as we read the different parts of the Old Testament.

3. CULTURAL DISTANCE

    Culture is difficult to define because its origins, motivations, and developments are highly complex phenomena. Art, music, relationship styles, attitudes toward strangers, clothing, forms of entertainment are all expressions of culture. Adding to the difficulty of definition is the fact that culture represents the tastes not of individuals, but of society at large.

    But even if we cannot define it precisely, we intuitively recognize differences in culture. We look at a picture from the sixties and chuckle at the hairstyles, the peace sign, the tie-dyed shirts, and the painted Volkswagen van. When we go to a museum of ancient artifacts, we are in for an even bigger shock. The art, literary expressions, relationships, and the practice of warfare strike us as bizarre. We may think to ourselves that if a time machine carried us back, the experience would be similar to encountering an alien from another planet.

    Now the Bible was God's Word to a specific people. It was, like his Son, incarnational. God did not reveal himself in some type of transcultural way (which is in fact an inconceivable notion). God's people lived in a specific culture, and he condescended to address them by using the conventions of their day. We see this most clearly in the fact that he spoke to them in Hebrew. In order for us to hear God's Word today, we must bridge the cultural gap by translating the Hebrew into English. Such a task entails learning the linguistic conventions of Hebrew and working hard at rendering God's message in a modern idiom that reflects his ancient intention.

    But it is not just language that is at issue here. Images, such as God as a shepherd (a royal image in the ancient Near East), drew from the contemporary experience of the ancient people of Old Testament times. Literary genres such as the treaty form of Deuteronomy arose in the ancient Near East and are not recognizable immediately today, because we do not use such forms.

    All of this is to say that it is not only because of its length and antiquity that we find ourselves distanced from the Old Testament; we also must take into account that we are modern (or postmodern, if you prefer) African-Americans or white Americans reading ancient Semitic literature. We will encounter strange customs, literary forms, and institutions. We must take into account the cultural form of the text as we seek to understand and apply it to our own situations.

4. POSITION IN THE HISTORY OF REDEMPTION

    The fourth reason why we feel distanced from the Old Testament may be the most important. As Christians, our faith is appropriately focused on Jesus Christ, who died on the cross and was raised to save us from our sin. He is the one in whom we have the hope of eternal life. We learn about Jesus most clearly in the pages of the New Testament, not the Old. When we turn to the Old Testament, we find a religion which leaves us cold. We read of priests, sacrifice, festivals, circumcision, food laws, and the like. We read of bloody wars against Israel's enemies and encounter psalms beseeching God to take a foe's child and dash its head against a rock. When it comes to the all-important matter of redemption history and salvation, we find much of the Old Testament irrelevant at best and offensive at worst. Added to the obstacles of length, antiquity, and cultural distance, the practical result is that Christians don't spend as much time in the Old as they do in the New Testament.

Principles for Successful Interpretation

    It is not surprising that we lack passion when we think of the Old Testament. Obstacles to understanding and easily applying it to our lives are abundant. In a word, we find ourselves at a distance from the Old Testament. Coming from the time before Jesus our Savior, it is old and culturally strange. Paradoxically, however, the first step that we must take to a healthy appropriation of the Old Testament is to fully embrace its distance from us. We will surely distort God's message to us if we read the Old Testament as if it had been written yesterday. We will surely misapply it to our lives and the communities in which we live if we don't take into account the discontinuity between the Israelites, who were the Old Testament people of God, and us Christians living at the beginning of the third millennium.

    Acknowledging this distance leaves us with a gap between the Old Testament and ourselves. The task of the interpreter--and anyone who reads the Bible is an interpreter--is to bridge the gap between the ancient text and our modern situation in a way that does not infringe on the integrity of the original. What we are talking about here has the technical name of "hermeneutics." The first part of that word is taken from the Greek god Hermes, whose basic role was to deliver the messages of the other gods. In other words, the field of hermeneutics studies the nature of written communication.

    The intention of the balance of this chapter is to suggest a basic hermeneutic for the study of the Old Testament. The principles we will enunciate are not rigid laws to be applied in the same way in every text; rather, they are principles to keep in mind in reading and studying the Old Testament.

    Principle 1: Discover the Author's Intended Meaning

    We begin with a clear statement of the fundamental goal of Old Testament study: discover the author's intended meaning. A clear understanding of this goal of interpretation is essential because of challenges presented to it in both popular thinking and scholarly writing.

    Many times when I shared the gospel with a non-Christian relative or friend, I was met with the response, "Well, that's your interpretation." That statement seems so obvious and so non-contradictory that many people think it ends the conversation; more sadly, it counters the claims which the gospel is making on their lives. Let's unpack a bit what the statement means. Most people are vaguely aware that the interpretation of the Bible is somewhat debated. They know that there are different types of Christians; they also know that non-Christians adopt a totally different understanding of the text. Some take the Bible as historical, others as parabolic, still others as mythical, and a number as nonsensical. Further, while some people may agree that Genesis 1 reports a real space-time event, they will disagree as to whether the seven "days" of creation are twenty-four-hour periods of time, long geological periods, or even a term without any connection to chronology at all. The bottom line in such cases is that we have the option of taking the Bible any way we want. The way in which we have stated our first principle ("Discover the author's intended meaning"), however, indicates that when we declare, "The Bible says," we are not presenting our own views in the guise of an authoritative text, but the views of the prophets and apostles of old who spoke on God's behalf. This assertion, of course, does not answer the question of why we have different interpretations, but it does allow us a rejoinder: "Well, let's study the text together to see if what I just said is right or not."

    Contemporary scholarship, of course, takes a much more sophisticated approach. In a word, postmodern hermeneutics asserts that literary texts, the Bible included, have no determinate meaning. Since the days of the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s, to speak of the author's meaning has been considered a dead end. What has filled the void? We have moved from the opinion that meaning resides in the text or in the reader to the idea that there is no meaning.

    David J. A. Clines is the most influential recent writer in this area. Making explicit the position of many other contemporary critics, Clines assumes and states that the interplay of the numerous authors, the biblical text, and its readers through the years prohibits our speaking of "the meaning" of any particular text. He then blatantly says that we are free to interpret the text any way that we choose.

    So what determines the direction of Clines's own interpretations? Advocating what he calls "bespoke criticism," he cites the analogy of a tailor. We go to a tailor with material and ask him to make a suit. He then cuts the cloth to meet our specifications because we pay him to do so. Now the biblical text is like the material. Clines can cut the cloth into a variety of shapes, but he chooses the way that his paying customers request. Thus, if he preaches in an Anglican church, he will shape the text one way. If he is speaking to a group of feminists, he will cut it another way. If he speaks to a vegetarian group, he will interpret the text in yet a different way.

    Now Clines's approach may strike the reader as absurd. Actually, it is not so much absurd as pitiful. It is a legitimate route for anyone with the basic presupposition that the Bible has no determinate meaning. But why would such a person continue to devote his life to the biblical text? (In a recent review I suggest that an even older and less respectable profession where people sell their wares to paying customers might be a more suitable analogy.)

    In spite of the flaws in Clines's approach, we must admit that he and other cynics take their starting point from some real and profound problems with the position that we are arguing for here, so we must continue our discussion. We must defend our position that the meaning of a text resides in the author's intention.

    The first issue with which we must grapple is the fact that we are not always certain of the identity of the human author of a biblical book. I do not even have in mind here hotly contested books like the Pentateuch, where Moses' role is debated, or the question whether Solomon wrote all, part, or none of the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. I am thinking of the numerous anonymous books of the Old Testament. A partial list would include Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, many of the Psalms, and parts of Proverbs. We don't know the authors of these books; indeed, we are uncertain of the time period when some of them were written.

    A closely related issue has to do with the number of authors of certain biblical texts. Some Old Testament books show fairly clear signs of later editorial activity, which even the most conservative scholars admit. In the Pentateuch we speak of post-Mosaica, that is, passages written after Moses' death (most strikingly the account of his death in Deut. 34), and a-Mosaica, passages that sound awkward in Moses' mouth (e.g., Num. 12:3). Further, the history books were probably written over a long period of time.

    These two issues raise the question of what it means to ground the text's meaning in the intention of an author (or authors) whose name(s) we don't know and whose work we can't date with any level of certainty. But there are problems even in the case of those biblical books whose author we can identify. The issue here is that we have no independent access to any of the authors of the biblical account. How, then, can we confirm our interpretation of a passage through an appeal to its author? We can't interview Moses, David, or Nahum to ask him what he meant by his writings. We can't take the prophet Isaiah aside to inquire, "Whom did you have in mind when you spoke of the Suffering Servant in chapter 53? Were you thinking exclusively of a coming Messiah, or did you also have in mind Israel as a corporate entity?" An added difficulty is that we possess only one writing of most of the authors of the Old Testament, so we can't appeal to their other writings to get a better understanding, an approach we can take with a prolific author like Paul (though this brings its own problems).

    A fourth issue concerns the relationship between the human author and the divine Author. This is an issue that arises only within a hermeneutic that takes seriously the Bible's own claim of ultimate divine authorship. A biblical passage that raises the issue of the relationship between the human author and divine Author most dramatically is 2 Peter 1:20-21: "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophets themselves or because they wanted to prophesy. It was the Holy Spirit who moved the prophets to speak from God." This passage makes it clear that there is an inspiring force behind the writings of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, Peter, and the others--God himself. So while it is certainly correct to call the human beings whom God used to write his revelation authors, we must also speak of the ultimate Author, who is God himself. Our concern here is what we mean when we say that the goal of our interpretation is the author's meaning. When we interpret Hosea's prophecy, for instance, do we mean Hosea's intended meaning or God's?

    Now some scholars argue that there is no problem here. The human author's meaning is the same as God's. Well-known evangelical Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser makes this point strongly and almost persuasively. He rightly attempts to guard against an arbitrary form of exegesis that reads into biblical texts hidden or spiritual meanings that are not there and even conflict with the obvious meaning of the written word. However, the strict connection that Kaiser draws between human and divine intention in a biblical text makes it very difficult to explain some of the later biblical interpretations of earlier prophecy. A striking example is the use of Hosea 11:1 in Matthew 2:15.

    In the latter part of the Book of Hosea the prophet is presenting a case against Israel. Writing in the eighth century B.C., he is serving as God's lawyer and accusing them of great crimes against the Lord. The punishment for these crimes would eventually take the form of Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in 722 B.C. As part of his case, Hosea recalls God's gracious rescue of Israel from Egyptian bondage: "When Israel was a child, I loved him as a son, and I called my son out of Egypt" (Hos. 11:1). There is no doubt what Hosea has in mind. His intention is clearly to invoke the exodus, a historical event which took place centuries before his time, in order to make the Israel of his own day even more culpable in their rebellion. This is no forward-looking prophecy.

    However, when we turn to the Gospel of Matthew, we witness what strikes us at first as an amazing use of Hosea's words. The context here is the birth and infancy of Jesus Christ. After the wise men left, Joseph and Mary did not take Jesus back to Nazareth, but slipped down to Egypt. They took this precaution because God had revealed to them that they were in danger from Herod. After Herod's death they returned to Palestine, and it is at this point that Matthew notes, "This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet, `I called my Son out of Egypt.'"

    At first, we are taken aback. Nothing in Hosea prepares us for Matthew's use of the old prophet's words. However, upon reflection it makes sense. As we read Matthew 2:15 in the light of the Book of Matthew as a whole and the Bible in its entirety, we see that God has drawn an analogy between Israel, God's son, being freed from Egypt, and Jesus, God's Son, coming up out of Egypt. This analogy, which is observed by careful readers of the Gospel, reminds us to allow room in our hermeneutic theory and practice for what the Bible itself clearly demonstrates: God's intention may surpass the conscious intention of the human author. The ultimate meaning of a passage resides in the intention of the ultimate Author.

    Distinguishing between divine and human intention does not lead to the subjectivity and arbitrariness about which Kaiser worries. In the first place, the ultimate meaning of a passage is never at odds with the human intention; rather, it is an extension thereof. Second, we cannot appeal to the divine intention of a passage apart from the prodding of the Bible itself. It is actually the canon that set up the analogy between Jesus and the exodus. Indeed, Matthew does not here suggest that Jesus' being brought out from Egypt fulfilled a messianic prophecy found in one verse of Hosea, but that this event fit into a whole pattern of fulfilment: Jesus is himself the exodus.

    We have identified four contemporary popular and academic challenges to the primary hermeneutical task of discovering the author's intended meaning in a passage or book of the Bible. (1) We do not know the authors of a number of Old Testament books. (2) Some Old Testament books were written over a period of time by more than one author. (3) We know nothing about any of the authors of the Old Testament except through their writings. In any case, all the human authors of the Old Testament are dead and obviously cannot be questioned or interviewed to illuminate us about the intentions of their writings. And then, most importantly, (4) the Bible itself informs us that God stands behind the human authors and that sometimes the human authors wrote better than they knew.

    In order to meet these challenges and refute the skepticism of critics like Clines, we must present a more sophisticated understanding of what we are doing in interpretation. What do we really mean when we say that our goal is the author's intended meaning? To answer this question, we need to visualize the dynamic process through which God's revelation is communicated:

God--human author--BIBLICAL TEXT--first readers-- present-day readers

Through the biblical text messages are sent from the author(s) to the reader(s). Ultimately, the Bible is a message from God to us. We read the Bible, therefore, to discover what God intends to tell us today.

    Now God did not dictate his message to us in a mechanical fashion. Nor did he speak his word in a transcultural manner (whatever that might be), but in a way that was immediately understood by its first readers. God's revelation was specifically addressed to Israelites. It was written in Hebrew, and its human authors made use of their own style as well as native literary and cultural conventions. Theologically, we might think of the text as an incarnational model of revelation. Just as the Word of God came bodily to the world as a specific Palestinian Jewish male, so the Word of God written assumed a culturally specific form in the Bible.

    Clearly, God's act of communication through the Bible is not a simple, cut-and-dried affair, a fact that has practical implications. The first is that we must study the text thoroughly. Though our goal is the author's intention, we gain access to the author only through his text. Since the Author/author(s) spoke in the language and idiom of the ancient Near East, we must become acquainted with the Hebrew language and the broad literary and cultural conventions of the day. We must not read the Bible as if it had been written yesterday. This means, in effect, that in our reading we must first travel back in time (through our imaginations) and approach the text as if we were the first readers.

    But then we must read the Bible from our present situations. When we do this, we will note that we come to the Bible not from different, contradictory places, but from different, complementary places. As a white, middle-class American and professional Reformed theologian, I will attend to some aspects of the text and miss others. Another individual, say, a Latin American layperson living under an oppressive state government, will note other things. That is, our different situations will attract us to different aspects of God's message. So, then, we ought to read the Bible in community. Sometimes our interpretations will contradict each other; in that case one of us will probably be wrong, but we also need to be open to the possibility that we both may be right.

    As we examine the biblical text from our own personal situations, we must not give up our goal to discover the author's intention, ultimately God's intention. Otherwise, the Bible becomes meaningless as a religious document. It no longer is God's Word to us. Our hermeneutical task, then, is obviously no simple proposition.

    Two last words on the subject. First, some might think that our recommended approach will end up in confusion and uncertainty. Keep in mind, however, that what the Bible considers important it does not say once or twice, but hundreds and even thousands of times. We cannot miss the basic message of the Bible, which is the way of salvation. Here the doctrine of perspicuity comes into play. The Bible is absolutely clear on our spiritual problem and the solution to that problem, which of course is the gospel.

    However, we must also admit that there are interpretive issues in the Bible that are not so clearly answered. To pick just two of many, let's consider the hotly debated issues of the "days" of Genesis and the role of the millennium. These topics are debated because the Bible is not concerned to be clear about them. Such issues, while they should be studied and debated, must not be allowed to become a matter of fracture within the church.

    Second, some may wonder why we have restricted the goal of interpretation to the meaning of the text. Why haven't we spoken of the text's significance to us as individuals or to society as a second important goal? The fact is that we have. It may be possible to distinguish meaning from application on a strictly theoretical level, but it is never possible to do so in practice. For one thing, such a separation would demand that we approach the text as an object out there to be dissected before it is appropriated into our lives. It would ask us to be scientists in the interpretive task and to study the Bible objectively. But such study of the Bible is neither possible nor desired. It is not possible because we cannot make ourselves blank slates. We cannot fully divest ourselves of our presuppositions and concerns, some of which are so embedded in us that we have no awareness of them. It is folly to think we can approach the biblical text without some preunderstanding. But perhaps even more cogent is the fact that it would be undesirable, even sinful, to try to read the Bible objectively. God desires us to come to his Word with our questions, our adoration, our struggles, our worship.

    But what of the danger of reading our prejudices into the Bible? The history of the church is filled with people who consciously or unconsciously perverted the message of the Bible to fit their own needs. Many slave owners and slave traders, for instance, were devout Christians who believed the Bible justified their activities. On the other hand, there are a number of stories, most recently from Latin America, of oppressed Christians using the Bible to justify violent armed overthrow of the rich classes.

    Actually, we ought not divest ourselves of our prejudices when we read the Bible. Rather, we should be as aware of them as we can and submit them to the Word. We must allow the Bible to critique us rather than put ourselves in the position of criticizing the Bible. We must be as objective as we can with regard to our subjectivity and always aware that there is more under the surface. We are back again to the important point of reading in community. Further, we must fully embrace the idea that meaning includes significance. We cannot truly understand a biblical passage with just our head, but must involve our heart and our actions as well.

    Principle 2: Read Scripture in Its Context

    The Bible is a special book. It is the only book that comes ultimately from God. It thus has an authority that far surpasses that of any other book. However, we must not let its uniqueness obscure the fact that the Bible in other ways is a book like any other book. God chose to communicate his revelation to us in literary forms that we recognize from other written works. And keeping the Bible's literary nature in mind, we need to remember that the most basic of all principles in reading literature is to read in context.

    The principle of reading in context certainly makes sense, and most of us will affirm the need to so read the Bible, at least on a theoretical level, but many of us fail to do so in practice. Our failure has more to do with laziness than anything else. We give the Word of God only a snippet of our time, so we end up reading only a snippet, that is, a few verses here and there. Since we don't know Scripture well enough to have a sense of the whole, we end up extracting nuggets out of God's gold mine of truth. The problem is, extracting Scripture from its context often results in misunderstanding and misapplication of the Word of God.

    To read a passage of Scripture in context is simply to read it with a sense of its place in the whole. This is, on the one hand, one of the easiest of our hermeneutical principles and takes the least amount of time. But on the other hand, it takes a lifetime. This is true because the Bible is unfathomably rich. So rich that no one can master the Scripture in a lifetime. There is always something more to know, something more to learn from God's Word. And it is precisely from our knowledge of the whole that we must read the part.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 1998 Tremper Longman III. All rights reserved.