How NOT to Read the Bible 2: The Complete Record

An Argument from Silence

An “argument from silence” is when someone uses the fact that something is not mentioned in a text as evidence that this something didn’t exist, was unknown, or whatever. This is valid in some circumstances – for example, if a writer has expressly set out to make a complete list, something missing is significant – but it is often misused. In general, an argument of the form “if X were the case, so-and-so would have mentioned this” is a weak argument.

What I find worrying is how often bible commentators forget this maxim when interpreting the Bible. The most blatant example I have seen (and I have seen it in more than one place) comes up in Acts chapter 15. This describes an event sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem, at which church leaders met to decide under what terms Gentiles (i.e. anyone not a Jew) could become Christians. (If you want to look up the passage, you can find it at Bible Gateway.)

The story is told as follows:

Verses 1–5: there is a controversy in the church at Antioch about conversion to Judaism, represented by circumcision. Paul and Barnabas travel to Jerusalem to take part in the debate, and find controversy there, too.

Verses 6–11: there is much debate. Peter gives his testimony of preaching to Gentiles, and proposes that non-Jewish converts should not need to take on the Jewish Law, since salvation is through Jesus, not through keeping the Law.

Verse 12: Paul and Barnabas give their testimony of preaching to Gentiles.

Verses 13–18: James sums up the debate and quotes some passages from the Jewish Bible (i.e. the Christian Old Testament) to back up Peter’s position.

Verses 19–21: James puts forward a four-point moral code for Gentile Christians to follow.

Verses 22–29: The church elders put the four-point moral code in a letter and choose delegates to take the letter back to Antioch.

I have seen in commentaries, and heard in preaching, that this passage demonstrates that James (this is usually taken to be James the brother of Jesus; it is not James the Apostle, who had been executed at the beginning of chapter 12) was the “undisputed leader” of the Church in Jerusalem. Why? Apparently, because this passage records no reply after James puts his point.

The language James uses does indicate that he is a leader; but “undisputed” is a blatant argument from silence. Even if you take the passage to be literally true – the people concerned made exactly the statements recorded, just as they are reported here – you cannot legitimately deduce this.

For a start, verse 7 says that Peter made his speech after much debate. So we know already that the author (generally regarded as the same author who wrote Luke’s Gospel, and traditionally identified with Luke the Physician, a companion on Paul’s travels) is providing a brief summary of debates that may have gone on for days.

After Peter’s speech ends in verse 11, verse 12 begins with everyone falling silent to listen to Paul and Barnabas. This not only suggests but positively implies that Peter’s speech had set a lot of people talking. One can imagine (but please remember, this is only imagination!) whoever is in charge hushing them so that their guests can speak.

In verse 13, when Paul and Barnabas have finished (and incidentally, we are not given any of Paul’s or Barnabas’s words here), James speaks up. In some translations, “spoke up” is what it says; but the Greek word used actually means something more like “answered”, and other translations give that reading. Whom is James answering? He isn’t answering Paul and Barnabas. He is addressing the whole council as “brothers”, so this suggests (less clearly than last time, but still detectably) that there was more debate here, and that this was not immediately after the speeches but as soon as he could call order and get a word in.

James’s speech takes us up to verse 21, at which point translators and editors tend to insert a paragraph break, and some insert a section break with a new heading. Verse 22 begins this new section, “Then the Apostles and Elders … decided” or, closer to the original wording, “Then it seemed good to the Apostles and Elders …”. But does “then” mean immediately after James’s speech? Or does it, given the new paragraph, mean “after the debate was over”? We cannot be sure. To argue one way from an editorial division into paragraphs is weak; but to argue the other from no evidence at all is at least as weak. All in all, we cannot be sure how much – or little – further debate it took to get James’s proposal accepted. What we can say for certain is that the author is giving us a very brief summary of a very long debate, probably lasting several days.

My point here is that an attempt to take the Bible literally – something I would not necessarily do, but many Christians do read the Bible this way – can lead to an argument from silence, which reads more into the passage even than a literal interpretation actually allows. A careful analysis of the passage instead shows that it is not a complete record, but a brief summary of a long debate.

So What if it Isn’t a Complete Record?

That’s all very well. The Bible isn’t a complete record. John says as much in the last verse of his Gospel: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25). But surely the Bible is all we have? If it isn’t a complete record, we just work with the bits we’ve got, don’t we?

Well, yes. Provided we don’t try and argue from silence. Except that when we realise it is not a complete record, we discover more about it.

As I write this, last Sunday’s readings included the call of Nathanael from John 1:43–51. (Again, here’s a link to Bible Gateway.) Jesus, having called Andrew and Simon (whom he would later rename Peter), calls Philip to be a follower. Philip goes and tells Nathanael that Jesus of Nazareth is the one who fulfils a lot of Old Testament prophecy, and (in verse  46) Nathanael replies with a rude remark about Nazareth.

Then it gets interesting. Jesus sees Nathanael coming and remarks, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” Nathanael not surprisingly wants to know how Jesus even knows him, and Jesus says, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael then calls Jesus “Rabbi”, “Son of God” and “King of Israel”. Jesus deflates this enthusiasm with a remark along the lines of “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

So what is going on here? We know that the Bible isn’t a complete record, so presumably there are gaps. And it would be useless, even counterproductive, to speculate on what might fill them. The important thing is to recognise the gaps, and then we might learn something from the gaps themselves.

In this case, Jesus refers to an incident under a fig tree. We are told nothing about this, but it seems to have huge significance to Nathanael. Sometimes people do try and speculate on this; but we have nothing to go on. What we can see is that Jesus knew to pick an incident (presumably recent, but before Philip had gone and fetched him) that would convince Nathanael, and it is likely that neither Jesus nor Nathanael felt the need to tell anyone else what it was.

To summarise, we have looked for a gap in what we’re told. We can’t fill the gap, but finding the gap has showed ways in which Jesus related to followers – and prospective followers – in a very insightful and convincing way.

And the Literal Reading?

To me, these gaps are important in another way. They are quite different in character from the sort of gaps a storyteller might leave in a fictitious narrative. For a storyteller, to introduce the fig tree at this point, and then not tell us anything about it, would be quite a blunder. It would have a good chance of distracting us, the listeners, from the story he was trying to tell.

The presence of details like this is, for me anyway, one of the strongest pieces of evidence that someone is reporting true events, not spinning a yarn – and, in particular, not constructing a founding myth for a made-up religion. True events are messier than made-up stories, and looking for the gaps in a heavily condensed account has drawn our attention to some of the messy details that are hallmarks of a true story, as opposed to a fiction.

This is not to say that I believe that it is literally true, word for word – there are too many disagreements between the different Bible-writers’ accounts for that – but it is evidence that there is a true story here that these people are reporting, not a made-up religion for which they are constructing myths.

And we have arrived at that conclusion by reining in a tendency of people to try and take it literally.

Another sort of Gap

Gaps like these appear because the writers are trying to produce a brief summary of a long or complicated series of events. Other gaps appear because of what the writer feels is so well-known as not to need saying. Sometimes there are so many gaps – of both sorts – that we are left with little details whose context has disappeared.

An example of this can be found in John’s description of the Resurrection, John 20:1–10. (Here’s a link to it on Bible Gateway.) The story, as told, has Mary Magdalene finding the tomb empty and going and telling two of the Twelve (verses 1–2); Peter and John running to the tomb, John getting there first but Peter going in (verses 3–6)

Then in verse 7 we get a strange out-of-context detail: they find the sheet in which the body had been wrapped “as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.”

After this, they puzzle over it all, fail to reach a conclusion, and go home (verses 8–10).

What can we make of this? The care John takes to record who did what first – John reaching the tomb first but Peter going in first – suggests that there was some controversy, possibly even among the Twelve, as to who had seen what when, and who had been first in various matters. But what about the detail of verse 7?

One preacher I heard said that this detail cannot have any theological significance. It is therefore exempt from any accusation that it was added later to make a theological point, and is probably literally true.

This is a neat theory. (It also inspired much of what I was writing about the call of Nathanael above.) Some of the listeners, unfortunately, interpreted it to mean “Only the bits of the Bible that don’t have theological significance are true.” Far from it! If it is literally true that the disciples found the grave clothes in different parts of the tomb, then it must also be true that they found an empty tomb, with all that that implies. Once again, identifying a gap (not in the narrative this time, but in the theology) has led us to evidence of the truth of the story.

However, I don’t think that this is what’s going on here. What I think we have is not an irrelevant detail that has become fossilised in the narrative, but a detail that had great significance to the writer – John, probably the same John who was racing Peter to the tomb – but we lack the background to interpret. This verse comes in a passage where John has here been taking pains to record exactly who did what and in what order. I think it makes far more sense to suppose not that it is an insignificant detail, but that it is one of the things that John felt needed recording in this way.

Nonetheless, this does not detract from the result above: that the presence of a detail like this implies that the empty tomb scene really did happen, with all that this implies. In other words, now we have found a gap: not in the narrative, but in the theology, or in our knowledge of the context. Either way, it points to the truth of an important piece of the story: possibly because it is irrelevant, and therefore exempt from accusations of fabrication; or possibly because it has survived from something that was relevant to the writer and his first readers, but is lost to us. In both cases, we cannot see what the detail itself might have meant, but its position in the narrative tells us something about that narrative.

To Conclude

The wrong approach to literal readings of the Bible can lead to treating it as a complete record of events. In fact this is an argument from silence, which is usually a weak argument, and in the case of the Bible, often not justified even by a literal reading.

Rather, Bible stories (especially in the New Testament) are often highly condensed summaries of events, with numerous gaps in the narrative. Looking for these gaps (but not attempting to plug them) can give us a deeper insight into the events being described, and can often provide evidence of the truth of the story itself.

Further Reading

All bible quotations are from the New International Version, via Bible Gateway, except Acts 15:22 (quotations from both NIV and ESV) and John 1:50 (my own paraphrase).

Once again, I’ve looked through my commentaries, but failed to find a reference for the assertion that James is the “undisputed” leader. The commentary in the ESV Study Bible (ed. by Lane T Dennis et al.; Crossway Bibles, 2008) came close, however. It provided a lot of argument to justify the assertion that James was in charge, and no discussion of the gaps.

How NOT to Read the Bible 1: Parables

I’m hoping this will be the first of a series of articles highlighting common pitfalls in reading the Bible. Here, I am not attempting to expound individual parables (except as examples of how people can read them wrongly), but to show how certain approaches to reading parables are wrong, and can lead to very wrong conclusions

What are Parables?

A parable is in essence a story used to make a theological or moral point. It does this by taking something unknown – an attribute of God, for example, or the moral status of some piece of current affairs – and likening it to something in the story.

A classic example may be found in 2 Samuel 12:1–4. Here, the prophet Nathan tells King David a story about two men, one rich, one poor. In this story, the rich man needs some meat in a hurry to provide for an unexpected guest; instead of taking an animal from his own holdings, he commandeers the poor man’s only lamb, who has been reared almost as a family pet. David at first takes this story literally, and starts to order punitive damages against the rich man, only to have the wind taken out of his sails when Nathan reveals that this story is a parable about David’s own behaviour.

David’s behaviour has been told to the reader already, in chapter 11. Here, David had not led his armies into battle, as kings usually did; instead he had stayed at home, where he had an affair with the wife of one of his army officers. Having got the woman pregnant, he first tried to pass the child off as not his; when this failed, he sent the officer off on a suicide mission so he could marry the woman (alongside the several wives he had already).

Having told David the parable, Nathan launches into a tirade against David’s behaviour, and predicts that worse things will happen to David – while Uriah, David’s officer, never knew what David had been doing with his wife, Nathan predicts that the same thing will happen to David quite openly, where David and everyone else will know about it.

So how does the parable work?

• There is a story, in this case about the two men and the lamb.

• The story talks about something the audience knows – in this case, the immorality of the rich man’s high-handed behaviour.

• The parable then has to link something unknown to this: David presumably didn’t realise (or more likely didn’t stop to think) that it was wrong to murder a man, however indirectly, in order to get at his wife.

Some parables are much shorter; Jesus often used short parables. In Matthew 12:22–24, Jesus has been performing miraculous healings, driving out demons. While some think this must mean he is from God, others say that it is by the Devil’s power that he can drive out demons. Jesus responds by telling a couple of these short parables. First, in verses 25–28, he uses the image of a kingdom divided against itself to make a point about the Devil’s inevitable defeat; then in verse 29, he asks: “How can anyone break into a strong man’s house and make off with his goods, unless he has first tied up the strong man? Then he can ransack the house.” Short though these are, they still have the same three characteristics:

• There is a story: a country in a state of civil war that cannot defend against invaders; a housebreaker immobilising his victim before he ransacks the house.

• The story tells about things the audience understand: in the Near East, everyone would know that any country that couldn’t sort out its own affairs was ripe for invasion; likewise, no one would have failed to appreciate that if a housebreaker finds the owner in, he won’t be able to steal much unless he first deals with this inconvenience!

• The parable links something unknown to this. The maxim about the divided kingdom is used to point out that if the Devil is not being defeated here, his organisation is in such a disordered state that his defeat is inevitable anyway; it makes more sense to deduce that Jesus does not get his power from Satan but from God. The second extends this: if God is ransacking the Devil’s domain, he must already have taken steps to overpower the Devil and bind him.

Where do we Find Parables?

The examples above show that Jesus, so often using parables, was drawing on a tradition going back to King David or earlier. Jesus used longer parables as well as these short ones; the prophetic books of the Old Testament also use parables. An example of a longer one may be found in Ezekiel 23, some shorter ones in Amos 3. These are straightforward examples of the use of parables (although, as with so many of Jesus’s stories, there is room for debate over their interpretation).

Outside the Gospels, the New Testament writers seem superficially not to go in for parables much. Nonetheless they are there. Paul, in Romans 14:1–6, uses some stories in a similar way. Here he tells of two people, both Christians; one who eats meat, the other a vegetarian; and two people, one who insists on a strict Sabbath once a week, the other who will work on any day that is convenient.

The first two elements of the parable are present: the stories (of the two pairs of Christians), linked to something familiar to his readers (there is evidence of heated debates in the early Church about Sabbath observance; vegetarianism may have been similarly linked to debates about kosher observance). The final element – something unknown that is linked to this – is missing, however. Instead, Paul comments directly on the morality of the four characters to make his point: in this case, that different ways of living out one’s Christian faith are valid; in neither of his stories does one character have the right to impose his version on the other.

What the New Testament writers do do, however, is treat Old Testament stories as parables to which they can attach a Christian message. An example of this is in Hebrews 7. The (anonymous) writer here takes a well-known Bible story – his readers were Hebrews, after all, and could be relied on to be familiar with the Old Testament – and uses it to make a point about Jesus.

• The story is that of Abram’s meeting with Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18–20. Abram (who would later become Abraham) is returning home from a successful military campaign, and Melchizedek, theocrat of Salem, comes out, gives him food, and blesses him. One of them (the account in Genesis is not clear) gives the other a tenth of everything.

• This story being familiar to the readers, the author can use it to make a point about Jesus. Jesus, he says, is a priest of the order of Melchizedek. The writer to the Hebrews plays with the lack of detail in the Bible story. He asserts that it is Abraham who gave a tenth of his booty to Melchizedek, by way of recognising the latter’s authority; just as we are told nothing of Melchizedek’s background, Jesus is the One without beginning or end; and since Melchizedek was King of Salem, a Hebrew name meaning “peace”, Jesus is King of Peace.

Finally, and most controversially, it makes sense for us to read some Old Testament stories as parables even though they are presented as history. In a sense, we are doing what the writer to the Hebrews did with the story of Melchizedek: taking a traditional Jewish story and giving it a Christian meaning. It is worth pointing out that this is not “cultural appropriation” – this way of appropriating stories was itself part of the Jewish tradition within which the author was working.

An example of this is the Book of Jonah. Jonah is one of the twelve “Minor Prophets” – short books that were traditionally collected all on one scroll in Hebrew bibles. Unlike most of these, which are books of prophecy, Jonah is a story: how the prophet received his call to preach to the Ninevites; tried to get out of it by travelling in the opposite direction; and was forcibly sent to Nineveh to do his preaching. There, he preached coming destruction; the people repented of their sin; the destruction was averted; and Jonah proceeded to moan about the way his prophecy hadn’t come true.

This is one of the Old Testament stories that gets used as a parable in the New Testament. Specifically, the episode from Jonah 2, in which he is forcibly returned to land, has him swallowed by a fish and regurgitated when he comes to shore. In Matthew 12:39–40, Jesus uses this story as the known, to which he likens his own death and resurrection as the unknown.

My view is that, while one could read a story of someone miraculously returned to land so he could pursue a prophetic ministry, followed by the story of that ministry, as a historical narrative, it makes at least as much sense to read it all as parable. Here, the parable is incomplete, since we don’t have all the information about the unknown domain, and what it is we are to read out of it. We do have some – chapter 4, for example, contains a fairly complete parable about a shady plant that died, exposing Jonah to the elements, linked to a clear message about how God feels about Nineveh. Nonetheless, we lack the meanings of other parts, such as the story of the storm and the fish in chapters 1–2. This actually helps Jesus to appropriate the story as a parable in Matthew 12.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Don’t Take the Story Literally

Where the story is presented as a person telling a parable, no one would consider taking it literally. When Nathan tells David the parable of the poor man’s lamb, although David takes it literally at first, once Nathan has made it clear it is a parable, nobody reading it thinks it odd that David drops the search for the high-handed rich man. Similarly, when Jesus tells the story of a housebreaker tying up his victim, nobody then or now thinks he is talking about an actual housebreaker who really does this.

Nonetheless, when it comes to a story like Jonah, people say it must be true, because it’s the Word of God! If we, as Christians, believe that Jesus is God, then any story he tells must be the Word of God at least as much as an Old Testament story is. So if we can say that he told stories that weren’t true, to make a point, then surely we can say that some stories included in the Old Testament, equally the Word of God, are equally untrue, but told to make a point.

One commentary I read states that Jesus’s use of the Jonah in Matthew 12 requires the story to be true. This is nonsense! What it requires is for his listeners to have been familiar with the story.

As a final example of how this works, I have a highly irreverent cartoon take on the Old Testament called Schnell-Bibel – High-Speed Bible. This gives a lighting tour of the stories, illustrating them often with references to modern characters. Daniel, for example, is presented as Sherlock Holmes, using is powers of deduction to solve mysteries such as the writing on the wall (Daniel 5). Joseph is presented as Charlie Chaplin, waddling his comical way through various dreams (Genesis 37); he later morphs into Adolf Hitler, the chancellor given exceptional powers to deal with the state of emergency in Genesis 41. This transformation takes a couple of pages, but the frame I have scanned should give readers the flavour of it.

The point is that while Hitler was a real politician, Chaplin the screen persona of a real film-maker, and Holmes purely fictional, they are all used in exactly the same way: something known to the reader to which the Bible story can be linked.

Don’t Read the Parable Backwards

There is always something known in the parable to which the unknown is linked. The parable, however, is intended to teach us something about the unknown, not to teach us about the known.

Some of Jesus’s parables can be quite hard to interpret. For example, in Luke 16:1–13, Jesus tells a story of a manager who had been embezzling company funds. When he is found out, and knows he will be sacked, he doesn’t want to end up as a beggar, and he knows he couldn’t be much use as a labourer, so he uses more company money to create a community of people who owe him favours. When his boss discovers this, he commends the manager for his cleverness.

Part of the meaning of this we are told: the way this manager created a community of people who owed him favours is supposed to illustrate the way we should lay out our own money – not to spend it all on ourselves, but in doing good for other people (verse 9) – although even this is open to interpretation. We are also told (of the higher boss who commended him) that worldly people often have a better understanding of how to get on in such situations than more spiritual people (verse 8).

What we must not do, however, is take this story as teaching us anything about the manager’s initial dishonesty. Although it is used as an analogy for things we are encouraged to do, we must not take this parable as an indication that this sort of dishonesty is what God wants of us – not even in a hybrid form (embezzle from your employer to give to charity?)

This is not the clearest parable, but it is not difficult to see when one has turned it backwards. Other parables can easily be turned backwards without noticing, though. One such is Ezekiel 23. In this long chapter, much of it is a story about two sisters who went to Egypt and worked as (apparently high-class) prostitutes.

We are told at the start that they represent Jerusalem and Samaria – the capitals of the two Hebrew kingdoms. What we are not told, however, is what was going on in the capital cities. This, unfortunately, was probably supposed to be known to the listeners – what was not (or not widely) known was how immoral this was. The parable is designed to tell the listeners how immoral the culture of the two capitals was, by comparing it to the prostitution of these two girls (possibly under-age, and without their parents’ consent).

What the parable is not there to tell us is what God thinks of the girls’ working as prostitutes. I have seen (and commented on in a previous post) this parable held up as evidence that God disapproves of girls letting their breasts be fondled (verse 3) without even any discussion of whether this is a euphemism for more serious activities or an indication that the girls didn’t actually do anything more serious.

It is certain that Ezekiel’s audience would have been disgusted at the girls’ behaviour; that disgust is the known to which God’s feelings about the two cities are being likened. However, just as Jesus can use a story of dishonest practices to illustrate the (not at all dishonest) way he wants us to think of money, without implying anything about those practices, so can Ezekiel use a story of girls letting men fondle their breasts to illustrate what he is saying about Jerusalem and Samaria, without implying anything about the girls’ activities. This is not to say that such things carry no moral taint, still less that we have biblical evidence that they carry no moral taint; merely that this parable is not evidence per se that these things are immoral.

The point is that if it were valid to read the parable backwards like that – as a condemnation of prostitution, or even of petting above the waist – we would have a valid reading of Jesus’s parable saying that the dishonesty he describes is a good thing.

Don’t Over-Extend the Metaphor

I have heard it preached that a parable, unlike an allegory, makes only one point; it is wrong to try and find analogies between each detail in the parable and a corresponding detail in the real world.

While this is simplistic – many parables make more than one point, and some make a point in several of their details – there is a definite pitfall here. Christianity has a tradition of allegorical readings, which certainly have their place; but it is a mistake to look for such a reading and then assert that this is what the parable is there to teach us.

Luke 8:5–8 contains a good example of this. The story is of a sower, scattering seed (seed drills that placed the seed carefully in the furrow would not be available for many centuries). Some of the seed goes into the good soil that has been prepared for it, but other seed falls on a hard path, or among rocks, or among weeds.

Jesus gives an explanation in verses 11–15: the seed is the Word; while for many, the word takes root, develops and bears fruit, for others it is prevented by various problems. Jesus even details the problems and assigns a meaning to each one: on the path, the seed is picked up by birds, representing the Devil, who makes them forget the word as soon as they’ve heard it; on the rocks, it cannot get a good enough hold to get enough nourishment and water, representing people whose faith is superficial, and does not survive testing; and among weeds, it is choked out by the (already mature) plants with which it must compete, representing people whose other interests have already taken over their life, not allowing anything else in.

So far, so good. We can see that there is more than just a single point. But we mustn’t take this further. For example, the people who forget the word straight away (through the Devil’s influence) are represented by a footpath where the seed gets trampled (or maybe the path has been trampled). We could try and find a meaning for the people doing the trampling, just as the Devil is represented by the birds who eat the seed. While this might be useful, we mustn’t conclude that this is what Luke – still less Jesus – intended.

Another way one can go into too much detail is illustrated in verses 11 and 12. In verse 11, the seed is the Word; but in verse 12 (and for the rest of the explanation) the seed is likened to the different sorts of people who hear the Word. One could accuse Luke, or even Jesus, of getting in a muddle here; maybe Luke was compiling this from two different versions. This is possible – Jesus probably preached this on several occasions – but I think it is more likely that the problem arose translating from Aramaic (which Jesus had presumably been speaking) into the Greek that Luke wrote down: where Luke wrote “The seed along the footpath stands for those who hear it”, Jesus may have said something more like “The seed falling on the footpath stands for when people hear it” – likening the events (seed falling on the path, people hearing the Word), rather than directly comparing the people to the seed. When Matthew records the same parable (Matt. 13:3–8, with an explanation in verses 19–23), he doesn’t even put in the bit about the seed representing the Word.

Another way people sometimes over-extend the metaphor is by looking too deeply at the characters in the parable. While examining characters in great detail, working out their motivations, is something one can do in literary analysis, it is not of much benefit here. Staying with the same parable, one could ask why the sower is being so careless with his seed. One might conclude that it is because God wants everyone to have heard his word, whether or not they are going to respond to it; this then leads to the idea that one shouldn’t refrain from trying to reach someone with the Gospel simply because they are unlikely to respond. This is a valid point, but although studying this parable has led to it, it is not inherent in it.

If one were to examine the motives of the birds, on the other hand, one would conclude that, just as the birds steal the seed to eat, the Devil plucks the word from people’s memories because that is how he is nourished – a preposterous interpretation! Or maybe one would conclude that the seed really does represent people, not the Word (going directly against Jesus’s statement in verse 11), and that the ground is the Word. The Devil is thus taking the people out of the Word, not vice versa, and the interpretation is getting hopelessly tangled.

This last pitfall is an especial risk when one is reading ostensibly historical books, such as Jonah, as parables. There is a wealth of detail there, and some of it has meaning. The shady plant in chapter 4, for example, represents Nineveh, and when it dies, exposing Jonah to the sun and wind, this represents the punishment that Jonah had prophesied, but which had not happened. The fish in chapter 2 is not given a meaning here, but Jesus gives it one later. This is something he can do authoritatively; if we invent a meaning, we must not behave as though this was what was intended. But what about (for example) the sailors in chapter 1? We have considerable detail about their fighting against the storm, drawing lots, refusing to throw Jonah overboard, and so on. We can speculate about the meaning, and we might gain some valuable insights, but we must not claim that our speculations are what the writer – still less God – intended.

One more direction in which the metaphor can be over-extended is to look at other implications of the story as if these are as important as the message the speaker or writer intended. Jesus told his short parable of the divided kingdom in response to suggestions that he was driving out demons by the Devil’s power. One could interpret this as a general ordering his troops to retreat – not evidence of civil disorder, but of strategy that might give misleading impressions to the enemy and lure him into a trap. This suggests that the Devil is using Jesus to lure the crowds – who have watched the miraculous healings – into a trap. Whether or not it is true (and Christians do not believe that Jesus is doing the Devil’s work, here or anywhere else!), Jesus would not have been trying to say this!

Don’t Invent Details

This is a pitfall with bible stories whether we take them literally or as parables. Staying with Jonah, we have passages with a wealth of detail, and passages with almost none. After all the detail of the storm and the fish, but before the parable of the shady plant, chapter 3 sees Jonah preaching to the Ninevites: “In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown!” That’s it. Just that one sentence. Nothing about why. Nothing about how the people recognised the truth of his message. Similarly, after Jonah has been thrown overboard in chapter 1, and the storm has miraculously subsided, the crew offer a sacrifice and swear vows.

In chapter 3, there is little to which we can attach our speculation, although it is tempting to try. In chapter 1, however, we can readily speculate about the sacrifice and the vows, and I have even seen purely speculative material about the vows find its way into translations, not just commentaries.

When reading such passages as parables, the important thing is to remember that inventing details to analyse guarantees that any analogies you draw with those details will be speculative.

That said, researching the culture, and finding details that the hearers might have been expected to assume, is instructive, and can help our interpretation. For example, if we know about how ships were run in the centuries before Christ we can better understand what the sailors are doing in the Jonah story. What we must not do, is use this knowledge to invent details that are not there, and then attach meaning to those details.

To Sum Up

Parables appear throughout the Bible. Jesus used them a lot, and both he and the epistle writers co-opted Old Testament stories to use as parables. This use of Old Testament stories was a part of Jewish culture, and it makes sense to read some stories as though they were intended for this purpose. We should not assume that every story in the Bible was intended literally; still less should we assume that because Jesus or an epistle writer cites a story to make a point, this provides evidence for the story’s literal truth.

No matter whether we are interpreting parables that are clearly presented as such or passages that may or may not be factual, we must not attach meaning to too many details, still less to details that aren’t even there.

Finally, we must not read the parable as a commentary on the story. The story is being used to make a point about something known to the listeners; to read the parable backwards invites wrong conclusions, and, in the case of some of Jesus’s parables, risks imputing divine approval to highly dishonest practices.

Further Reading

Michael Korth, Klaus Pitter: Schnell-Bibel: für eilige Christen. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1990.

This is in German, but it is by far the best example I have found of using fictional and real characters alike to make a rhetorical point. As well as those cited, we get David as Elvis (real) and Samson as Struwelpeter (fictional – but not well known outside Germany).

The illustration I have used of Joseph transforming into the great dictator is from page 13.

Book Review: Every Man's Battle

Earlier this year, my therapist lent me a copy of Every Man’s Battle by Steve Arterburn, Fred Stoeker and Mike Yorkey. At first, I thought that this was simply some good advice, albeit set within some dodgy theology of rather Puritanical churchmanship. Later, however, I came to see this book as quite dangerous, and one a therapist ought to think at least twice before recommending to any patient.

I’ll start with the good stuff. This book is aimed at men who want to take seriously biblical (and traditional Christian) teaching on chastity, but who are struggling with inappropriate sexual feelings. It acknowledges that people who want to take chastity seriously may be in a minority, even within churches – I found particular resonance in an anecdote (p.54) of a Christian teenager who found it easier with non-Christian friends, who were prepared to accept that she might want to abstain for religious reasons, than with Christian friends who mocked her (to them) over-zealous attitude – and provides helpful advice about approaching the problem, starting with training oneself not to look at sexual images, or people who might stimulate sexual thoughts (except one’s wife); and going on to Orwellian “crimestop” techniques of diverting one’s thoughts when tempted to indulge in fantasies.

Unfortunately, that last paragraph encapsulates almost all that is good about the book. The rest of this review, I’m afraid, will deconstruct the book, going from things I merely disagree with, through things that I think are dodgy or blatantly bad exegesis, to advice in the book that I consider dangerous.

Interpreting Scripture: Principles

Whenever I encounter anyone – speaker, author, or whoever – who presents their interpretation of scripture as “this is how God thinks”, it rings theological alarm bells for me. However, I acknowledge that this is how reading the Bible works for many Christians, and this is not per se a reason to condemn the book. Indeed, it can be hard to separate from the general Puritanical background. The authors are very keen to take any piece of teaching, especially in the New Testament, and treat it as a rule that we are required to follow. Since this is a book on sexual morality, we cannot tell whether they do this in all areas of moral teaching, just a few, or just sexual morality; and a full answer would be different in each of these cases. We can, however, draw out a few points.

Starting not with the book under review but with the Bible, Romans 14 gives some valuable teaching on how to solve moral dilemmas. (As an aside, I frequently observe people arguing over moral questions, each side citing bible verses to back up their position, but neither side looking at this chapter, which actually provides teaching on how to answer such questions in general.) Here, Paul, by means of two examples – vegetarianism and Sabbath observance – explores how to resolve the issue when two people have different opinions. In both cases, those whose response to God’s Grace is to follow rules should not judge those who feel free of the rules, while those who feel that Grace has freed them from the need for rules should not look down on “weaker” Christians who do feel moved to follow the rules.

For Arterburn and Stoeker, however, freedom from rules is not an option. The rules have biblical authority; this should be enough! Perfection, not mere excellence (pp.49–50), is the standard not merely to which we aspire, but to which we must hold ourselves. At best, this gives the impression that the Grace we receive from God is merely the strength to follow the rules (freedom not from sin, but merely from the burden of past sin); at worst, that salvation is not by Grace alone but by Grace and works. (A few references to salvation, such as that on page 72, don’t really make up for this.)

On the question of whether the authors apply this to all morality, some areas of morality or only to sexual morality, the relationship between sexuality and morality – in both Christian and secular thinking, and in other religions as well – would be a good subject for a major study. It would cover questions like why a sex scandal is (or used to be) the most effective way of getting rid of a government minister (or even a king, in the case of Edward VIII), and why men can regard themselves as good Christians even as they employ prostitutes.

Interpreting Scripture: Passages

A tendency to turn everything in scripture into rules may be merely a point of churchmanship; but sometimes the way the authors do this, and the passages they pick, show up their interpretation as dodgy in itself. Two specific Bible passages stand out for me in this respect.

The first is a classic: such a well-known passage, and so easy to misinterpret, that any Christian writer who doesn’t spot the error is either being absurdly careless, or hasn’t been properly taught. The passage is Matthew 5:27–28: “‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’”

The obvious pitfall is to interpret this as “thinking about it is the same as doing it”, especially in the light of the parallel passage on anger, Matt. 5:21–22. I have heard this from Christians at house groups and similar gatherings, and it is indeed the line taken by Arterburn and Stoeker (p.156). But a moment’s thought shows that this is not valid. If thinking about hurting someone is the same (to God) as actually hurting that person, then it must mean that God does not care whether you actually hurt anyone. Some Christians may believe in a God who does not care about people, only about obedience, but I do not! A better interpretation is that such thoughts are just as much of a sin as the actions, not that they are the same as the actions.

The second passage was rather less familiar (to me at least): Ezekiel 23. Here Ezekiel is telling a parable of two Hebrew girls who go to Egypt to work as prostitutes, and come to a sticky end as a result. The prophet states that they represent Jerusalem and Samaria, the capital cities of the two Hebrew kingdoms. It seems (Ezekiel is far from clear about this!) that these two nations, or their capitals, have been encouraging other peoples and faiths to settle and take root in the Israelite territories.

Arterburn and Stoeker, however, turn the parable backwards, and use it to assert that God condemns the behaviour of the girls; not just that they prostituted themselves, but specifically that their activities as prostitutes included letting customers fondle their breasts (vv. 3, 21). This involves two errors. One is to take a small part – “petting” – out of context, as if it stands alone rather than (as here) a euphemism for other activities; but far worse is the inversion of the parable.

The way a parable works is that a story is used to liken something unknown (usually about God) to something known (in the world); in this case, the unspecified, but presumably known to Ezekiel’s audience, behaviour of the two nations is likened to prostitution. The purpose of the parable, however is to present the unknown, in this case God's view of the people's behaviour, by comparing that behaviour to prostitution, rather than to tell us about prostitution. This says nothing about what God thinks of prostitution; the parable works as long as there is a cultural aversion to prostitution (the known) to which God’s disapproval of things going on in the capital (the unknown) can be linked. It is bad exegesis to deduce that God has an aversion to prostitution; worse to pick one probably euphemistic detail (petting) and single out the passage as evidence (which even the authors admit is hard to find elsewhere in the Bible) that God disapproves of this in itself.

Why is this important? Why have I gone on about it for three whole paragraphs? Parables are important in the Bible, especially in the teachings of Jesus. Not only does this way of reading parables allow a commentator to attach divine authority where the parable does not put it, it can also make parables harder to understand. And with Jesus’s teaching, the parables are hard enough to understand even without such red herrings! The parable of the dishonest manager in Luke 16, for example, is enigmatic, and even seems to exhort the hearer to make friends by means of dishonesty (verse 9). Nothing can be gained in interpreting this parable if we also bring to it the idea that the example Jesus uses (a manager about to be fired, dishonestly using company money to create a community of people who owe him favours) is in itself something that God approves of, as well as an analogy for the actual message (and even without this there is so much uncertainty over the actual message that I shall not attempt an explanation here!).

Interpreting Scripture: Eisegesis

Eisegesis is the practice of reading meaning into rather than out of scripture. It is sometimes deprecated in bible courses, but it does actually have its place: allegorical readings and reader-centred approaches both use it to good effect. However, one caveat is important: while a meaning that one brings to scripture can be helpful in one’s own journey of faith, it cannot be authoritative – not over the reader, still less over those to whom the reader expounds scripture.

To give an example from my own faith journey, in my teens and my twenties, I used to justify my refusal to drink alcohol by reference to the Last Supper: Jesus said, “Do this as often as you drink it” (1 Corinthians 11:25), so whenever we drink alcohol it must be at a celebration of the Eucharist. Later I was confident enough that I felt no need to justify my abstinence, but either way, I knew (I hope) that this interpretation was something I brought to the text, not something that was inherent in it, and that I was free to interpret it differently and (most importantly) had no right to impose my reading on others.

The most blatant piece of eisegesis that I encountered in Every Man’s Battle comes on page 77. Here, the authors are talking about cultural ideas of manhood, or of manliness. And then they drop their bombshell: God’s only definition (another example of their attaching God’s name to their own interpretation of Scripture!) of manhood is “hearing his word and doing it” (their emphasis). Well, I can see where this comes from (Matthew 7:24 and James 1:22–25, for example), but not how it becomes a definition of manhood! This is pure eisegesis – an idea that the authors have brought to the Bible – but they are claiming it as “God’s definition”. (Indeed, in Matthew 7, both the wise and foolish characters in Jesus’s parable are described as ἀνήρ, an adult male, so it is not even another instance of reading a parable backwards.) And this is before we even start on the status of an obedient woman – if obedience defines manliness, is she being unfeminine?

General Difficulties

Moving on from the dodgy theology, what I found hardest was cultural assumptions. Some were simply differences that I could pass over; others made the text harder to understand, or broke the chain of the authors’ logic.

The big cultural assumption is that readers have grown up within a culture typical of the USA, possibly even the southern USA. Not quite secular American, for Christianity is still a much bigger part of culture in the USA than it is in Britain; but readers are expected to be normal American men, probably in their thirties or forties, married and with children. A reader who did not grow up in US culture, or who was a misfit in the culture where they did grow up (and I am in both categories!) can feel a bit at sea.

One example is in the discussion of manliness mentioned in the last section. As an example of a definition of manliness we must discard, the authors cite an (imaginary) man who needs to use two blades when shaving, one for each side of his face; and probably needs to do this more than once a day. “Those of us who are ‘smooth men’ … hold this tough guy in awe,” they say. Do we? As someone whose (electric) razor goes blunt in rather less than half the time predicted by the manufacturers, I know what a trial this man faces and feel rather sorry for him! Maybe I am not a “smooth man”, but I cannot imagine feeling awe for such a person.

These cultural assumptions colour the authors’ advice on how to avoid temptation. Not only do they assume that I have grown up discovering – and gratifying – my sexual desires in much the same way as an average American, they seem to give no thought to the possibility that I might be reading their book because my sexual desires are not typical, rather than because they are.

The assumption that the reader is married is also apparent in poor editing. On page 27, the authors list ten questions to determine whether you are close to sexual addiction; several of the questions ask about “other women” before the reader’s wife is even mentioned – she is merely assumed to be present as a referent for “other”.

(Further poor editing in this section: one list, from which if you display “any” behaviour you are close to sexual addiction, is followed by another, from which you need to display all the behaviours to be actually addicted. That, if taken literally, means that almost everybody is close to sexual addiction, almost nobody either free of it or actually addicted. “Close to” seems to have been redefined!)

Now, the authors do admit that they are writing primarily for married men, but say that their advice is for single men as well. This is fair enough, though it does not excuse sloppy editing; it is not valid, however, when an argument predicated on the fact that one is married is followed by advice for single men that boils down to “all the same rules plus some extras” (p.181). Maybe the advice is better tailored to single men in the companion volume, Every Young Man’s Battle. If so, the presumption that a single man is young shows how closely they expect readers to conform to cultural norms!

Finally, the Dangerous Bit

Cultural assumptions belong firmly in the category of mere disagreement. The last piece of advice, however, does not. This is that if you are a single man, and a single woman friend marries someone else, you should drop the friendship (p.181). My wife, when I told her of this, said that anyone who required their spouse to drop single friendships (as this hypothetical woman is expected to do) would be an abusive partner. I am not so sure, but I certainly see it as a bad sign, a sign that the relationship could easily lead to abuse. And yet readers are enjoined not only to condone such behaviour but to expect it!

This is only one example, but it shows that the attitude behind much of the thinking in this book is one that normalises abusive behaviour. A book that expresses such views can hardly be safe for a therapist to recommend to people who have many of the difficulties the book purports to address.

(All bible quotations are from the English Standard Version, ©2001 by Crossway Bibles.)

Pentecost

When I started this blog at the beginning of Lent, I had a declared intention of posting one article a week. As you have probably already realised, this did not happen. Articles on the war in Ukraine, the Atonement, why the Resurrection is important and not mere “proclamation” of a victory “won” at the Crucifixion, and so on, never got written.

However, for Pentecost I’d like to share something a bit less polemical than most of the articles I had planned.

Talking about the Spirit

Cally Hammond, in this week’s Church Times, says that the Spirit is the easiest Person of the Godhead to experience. I am not convinced, because our experiences of the Spirit are intensely personal. It is hard, if not impossible, to know what someone else’s experience of the Spirit is like; when I hear people’s descriptions, it might sound like a spiritual experience beyond anything I have ever felt; more often it comes across more like a physiological response to a heightened emotional state. In neither case, however, can I really compare such descriptions with what I feel, or even with each other. Perhaps this is what Philip Yancey meant when he said “Mention of the Holy Spirit summons up much confusion.”

This is reflected to some extent in the vocabulary we use to talk about the spirit. Here the problem is compounded: not only are we using words in an attempt to communicate something that is beyond words, but the words themselves change in meaning.

Spirit

In biblical languages, the word for “spirit” also means “breath”. This is true of Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic; it is discernible in Latin and English, where we can see a connection between “spirit” and “respiration”. In Genesis 1:2, where the Spirit is intimately involved in creation, one could argue that a better translation might be the breath of God. Likewise in John 3:8, where Jesus tries to describe the effect of the Spirit, “The wind blows where it wishes …” he seems to be deliberately punning in his choice of words for “wind” and “Spirit”.

It is worth mentioning that the Old Testament use of “breath” for “life-force” was consciously metaphorical. In Genesis 2:7 God breathes life into Adam, and in Ezekiel 37:9–10 the army of corpses is animated by breath. This breath/spirit is a metaphor for what distinguished a sentient being: God is not seen breathing life into any other creature, but we cannot infer that the ancient writers were unaware that other animals breathed.

Holy Ghost

It is unfortunate that “Ghost”, with connotations today only of spooks and spectres, survived long enough to stand for the Spirit in the Book of Common Prayer. This does refer to the “Holy Spirit” – notably in the prayer that opens the Eucharist – but most of the book refers obdurately to the “Holy Ghost”.

More worrying is the use of “Ghost” in languages that lack this confusion. In German, for example, the word for spirit is Geist, which means mind rather than spook; and yet in Germany I once saw a display of Sunday School interpretations of “Holy Spirit” based around children’s colouring in of a conventional spook image – the spectre in a sheet – and entitled “Wie ein Gespenst”: “Like a ghost”.

Paraclete

To most people, who only ever encounter it as a title for the Spirit, this word conveys no information. In Greek it seems to have meant a legal representative; “solicitor” might be a modern equivalent. It is sometimes translated “comforter”, but this hardly helps, with connotations more of a child’s security blanket than of the etymological “giver of strength”.

Tongues

One could (and I once did as part of my degree) write a whole essay on this one subject. There is probably more than one phenomenon described by this word. At Pentecost, the apostles spoke; everyone, even those from places so obscure that Luke couldn’t even find Greek names for them, heard their own language. In 1 Corinthians 14:28, Paul warns against speaking in tongues unless there is someone to interpret – hardly an issue if everyone is hearing their own language!

There are two problems here. One is that the word, and even the phenomenon, can be misused and made into something quite unspiritual. The second is that, possibly because speaking in tongues is so often described in Acts as symbolic of a range of manifestations, it can seem as if tongues are diagnostic: without them, the Spirit is absent. Applied to a church, this is bad; applied to an individual, this goes directly against Paul’s advice in 1 Corinthians 12:29, as backed up by 1 Cor. 12:11.

(At the risk of getting polemical again, 1 Cor. 12:29 is usually translated “Do all speak with tongues?” etc., but this is misleading: more literal would be “Of course not all speak with tongues.”)

Person, Substance, Being

Finally, we come to the notion of the Trinity, and the words used to describe the relationship between Trinity and Unity. This is difficult in any language, and words that we expect to mean the same are found in contrast to one another. Three Substances, one Essence? Three Persons, one Being? Rather than insist on a particular model, I prefer to accept that God cannot be fully known in this life, and therefore cannot be adequately described in Human language.

Images of the Spirit

A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, but this seems to be an average exchange rate. Some pictures add little to the text; others are worth far more than a thousand words, and can often convey things that words cannot.

At Pentecost, we tend to concentrate on images of wind and flame, which obscure an important point: that the Spirit is a Person, not just a thing.

However, to counterbalance my example of the Gespenst image of the Spirit, from the church I attended during my 2004 visit to Germany, I should like to offer you an image from the Thomaskirche (St Thomas’s Church) in Hohenbostel, which I attended in 2011-12, when working in Hanover. Here the artist has abandoned wind and flame, and returned to the gospel imagery of a dove – with a difference. (And provided a helpful caption in the local Low German dialect.)

 

Starting with the Bible

My first proper post to my blog! This took a lot of work to post; copying and pasting from a word processor into the editor on the blog site produced so many bits of strange formatting I ended up going through the HTML deleting <span> tags. Perhaps I need a span filter. (OK, you can stop groaning now.)

Since I am starting a new blog, I shall start by writing about starting points. Specifically, one starting point that is particularly popular today.

Starting with the Bible

I once heard a sermon in which the preacher asserted that there are no inconsistencies in scripture, and backed this up with a verse from scripture! I was so appalled at this fallacy that I didn’t even register what the verse was. Others to whom I tell the story usually suggest 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”

In Christianity today, this attitude to the Bible seems distressingly common. Many people would insist that faith must be “Bible-based”. The verse from 2 Timothy is often quoted; a maxim from Calvin’s commentary on that verse, “We owe to Scripture the same reverence that we owe to God,” is sometimes added. However, all these assertions beg an important question, seldom raised:

What do we mean by “the Bible” or “Scripture”? How do we know that the collection of writings that the Church accepts is correct?

So what’s the problem?

1. If you are trying to persuade someone that the Bible comes from God, the chances are that this is because they don’t yet accept its authority. So an assertion from within the Bible that it is all God-breathed (whatever that means) will carry very little weight with them. After all, anyone can write a book that claims to be from God – whether Mohammed, Brigham Young or L Ron Hubbard – but a claim within the book carries little weight unless we already accept the book’s authority; and if we already accept the book’s authority, it is superfluous.

2. What did Paul – assuming he actually wrote this – mean by “Scripture”? What did Timothy understand by it? Commentators are divided: some think he meant the Hebrew Bible – what Christians call the Old Testament – while others think he meant the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish Bible that was common in the Near East in New Testament times. The latter contains many books that are not in the Hebrew Bible – some because the Hebrew had been lost, others that were written in Greek – and extended versions of some of the canonical books. Paul had studied in Jerusalem with a leading rabbi (Acts 22:3), so he must have known the difference. Timothy was half Greek; he had been taught the Jewish faith by his mother and grandmother, but he had not had a Jewish education, nor even been circumcised. Even if he spoke some Hebrew, I think it very unlikely that he read the Bible in that language. So would he have taken Paul’s “all Scripture” as meaning the whole of the Septuagint, not just the Hebrew Bible? Whatever Paul may have meant, it could not have been “the 66 books that will eventually become the Christian canon,” not least because not all of them had been written.

3. Even if Paul didn’t mean the Christian Bible, many would say that it can, even should, mean that for us. But this doesn’t answer the question: if we are taking it to mean some other collection of writing than that which Paul meant, it can no longer tell us what that collection should now include.

4. Does the verse even say that? In the Greek original, there is no word for is. Translators can insert it in the traditional place, All Scripture is God-breathed and useful … or, possibly better, insert it later: All God-breathed Scripture is also useful …. Again, commentators vary; some modern scholars give a good argument for the latter reading but chicken out at the last minute, concluding that although the function of the verse is not to assert the inspiration of scripture, there is no need to deviate from the traditional translation.

5. Finally, what do we mean by “Scripture”? Most people, I think, would give a definition that boils down to “Texts from our holy Book”. So to assert that all texts from our holy book come from God makes sense, but doesn’t say anything about what texts are to be included in the book. The same preacher who said there were no inconsistencies in the Bible (I was organist for twelve years at the church where he was vicar, so I heard a lot of his sermons!), also asserted that Mark 16:9–20 was “not scriptural”, because it was a later addition. So even if you accept the authority of Paul’s statement in its traditional translation, and its application to the Christian Bible, there is still room to pick and choose texts.

In short, the verse usually cited to justify reverence for Scripture may well be a mistranslation, and even as traditionally translated, it cannot bear the burden that it is so often called to bear: that of justifying reverence for the Christian Bible. It certainly does not justify the level of reverence that Calvin recommended, which I would consider idolatrous.

Calvin, at least, recognised the question of how we know which books are to be included. His answer was that when the believer reads the Bible in the proper attitude of prayer, the Holy Spirit enters him or her and reveals the divine nature of the writings. At face value, this provides an answer not only to the question of the extent of Scripture but to that of its interpretation. However, there are two important deficiencies.

First, it gives no help when people disagree, on either point. If you and I both believe we have read the scripture in the correct prayerful manner, but arrive at different answers, what can we do about it? To me, the only logical answer is the postmodern one: the Spirit has revealed one truth to me, and a different, equally valid truth to you. I have no more right to impose my truth on you than you have on me.

Unfortunately, this is of no value in establishing a single body of “scriptural” texts that everyone can accept as from God. Instead, what seems to happen is that when such a disagreement occurs, each party believes that they, being guided by the Spirit, must be right; the other must be wrong. Calvin has done the opposite of what he intended: in trying to provide a way for a book to be the authority, he has made the ultimate judge of correctness something within oneself. Unlike tradition, it provides no body of literature for disputants to consult; unlike reason, it provides no formal process of argument for one to present to another.

The second problem is that people don’t put it into practice. They may claim that the Holy Spirit, when one reads a text in the right (prayerful) way, reveals the text’s divine nature, and that this answers the question of which documents belong in the Bible; but they only apply it to documents that they already believe to be scriptural, or at least which have such a claim within the Christian tradition. Some may apply this technique to the Book of Tobit, but do any read the Gospel of Thomas this way? Or the Shepherd of Hermas? Or the Book of Mormon? Or the Qur’an? Or the Bhagavad Gita? The list is endless. And this, of course, means that we can’t answer the question this way – there will always be the possibility that there is a document we have missed that ought to be included in Scripture.

And yet, these people, who cannot answer the question “Why the Bible?”, insist that it is important. The vicar under whom I used to serve as organist (I promise this is the last time I’ll cite him, in this article anyway) went further in his sermon on Galatians 1:8, “But even if we or an angel from Heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!” He asserted that “gospel” here meant the whole Bible, and that if anything were added to the Bible, or anything taken away, there would be no Gospel at all.

Leaving aside the question (which arises here just as in 2 Timothy) of what Paul meant, and his readers understood, by “gospel”, our original question arises here, too: I asked him how we know we have the right Bible to start with, and he said “I don’t see why you should question it!” So here was someone who not only taught that Scripture was a higher authority (“way higher” was his phrase) than tradition or reason, but also insisted that the collection of texts in scripture must be exactly correct, advising me to submit scripture to tradition – to accept what had been handed down to me – without question.

Seeing the way this argument is going, it would be too easy to conclude that a religion based on a holy book is absurd, and maybe reject Christianity altogether – or at least reject any modern notion of Christianity in favour of the “magisterium” model that ruled the Western Church before the Reformation: there is an institution – the Church (which could be the Roman Church, but bear in mind that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society also makes this claim) – that takes upon itself the exclusive right to tell us what documents are to be included in the Bible and how to interpret them.

Instead, however, I want to ask a much more positive question:

If we can’t treat the Bible as the ultimate authority – because its authority cannot be established unless it is already authoritative – how can we start with the Bible?

One thing we can do is start with the Bible as a historical document. By this I do not mean that I am going to regard all the narratives in there as accurate records of events – that is an honour one might accord a holy book, not a historical record! – but ask the historian’s question, what can we deduce from this book about the events it describes?

The Christian Bible is in two parts: the first, longer, part is essentially the bible that was revered and considered authoritative by the Jewish people two thousand years ago (although it was not totally fixed, even then). The second, shorter, part describes the ministry of one itinerant Jewish preacher, who was eventually executed by the authorities, and whose followers then turned him – literally – into a cult figure: more than just a martyr, he has come to be regarded by the end of the book as God in human form (e.g. Philippians 2:5–11).

The turning point is the death of Jesus. From a historical point of view, we can see its importance to the writers simply from the amount of space it is given in the narratives. As you might expect, the effect on his followers, who “had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21) was huge. Some of them continued to meet, but in secret; they had no idea what to do; and by and large the movement was breaking up.

This is when things started to change. First, Jesus’s followers had an experience that they all interpreted as his having come back to life. This is not an example of a primitive culture that doesn’t know the facts of life: someone from those times would probably be more amazed by (say) our use of a defibrillator to revive someone whose heart has stopped than we are by the stories of the resurrection – not to mention other medical miracles that take place routinely in our hospitals. Indeed, “doubting” Thomas (John 3:25–29) probably showed the typical reaction to a story of this sort. This is not sufficient, qua historical evidence, to convince us. But it should certainly keep us reading!

Only one of the four versions of the narrative continues past this point. The writer we know as Luke followed his gospel with a book that we call The Acts of the Apostles. This tells the story of Jesus’s disciples as they regroup following his death and, galvanised by two experiences, they build a movement that has, by the end of the Bible, become a new religion. Those two experiences were the one they interpreted as Jesus’s resurrection, and another, seven weeks later (Acts 2:1–4), that they interpreted as “baptism with the Holy Spirit.”

It is worth noting here that “Baptism with the Holy Spirit” is not a phrase Luke uses in connection with the Pentecost experience, but one all four gospels (Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8, Luke 3:16, John 1:33) attribute to John the Baptist; although John the Baptist predicts this phenomenon, it is not described in any of the four gospels.

The question for the historian is: what happened to these people to transform them from the scattered followers of a dead preacher into a new religion? The only testimony we have is theirs, recorded in the New Testament.

Seeing the New Testament in this way invites another question: what about Paul? Paul, who wrote so much of the New Testament, was not one of Jesus’s followers. According to Acts, he experienced not the resurrection and Pentecost, but a very personal conversion on the way to Damascus. (The attribution is important, because Luke was probably one of Paul’s ministry team.) And yet Paul has become one of the most influential of the witnesses who gave us our New Testament.

Unfortunately, this is a hard question to answer. While one might conclude that Paul is the writer who best presented the Christian faith, and therefore his writings were collected, this could become a circular argument: if the Christian faith is based on the Bible, then to observe that the writer most collected in the Bible best presents that faith tells us nothing.

A more plausible explanation is simply Paul’s career. He travelled widely as a missionary, and planted churches in many places. When unable to travel, he wrote many letters to people in the places where he had planted churches, and to people with whom he had worked. Not all of these letters survive – for example, there was at least one other letter to the Corinthian church, now lost (1 Corinthians 5:9). I think the sheer volume of correspondence, and the fact that he was highly regarded at the churches to which he wrote, can account for the preservation of so many of his letters. His individual take on Christian (and Jewish) doctrine has, however, made its mark on biblical Christianity.

Nonetheless, Paul’s writings were recognised by the Church before the New Testament was completed, let alone finalised (2 Peter 3:15–16). (Peter there calls them “scripture”, but we must remember that this term is not clearly defined.) The narrative of Acts 15 has a number of Pauline ideas articulated by Peter, though this may be Luke putting a Pauline spin on the story.

I think I have now reached the point where I can set forth how I start with the Bible.

1. Starting with the Bible as a holy book raises more questions than it answers, mainly along the lines of how we know we have the right holy book. This is not a useful place to start.

2. Reading the Bible as a historical document, I find that the followers of Jesus, demoralised and scattered after his death, had two transforming experiences in the few weeks following.

3. As a result of these two experiences – which they interpreted as (a) witnessing his return to life and (b) being baptised in the Holy Spirit – they regrouped. Behaving not as the scattered followers of an executed rebel, but an empowered movement, they built what would become the Christian religion.

4. The New Testament is founded on their testimony. Actually, few of them wrote much – most of the narrative comes from others who wrote down their testimony, and most of the teaching comes from Paul – but these are the documents that they and their successors recognised as “Scripture” on a par with the Hebrew Bible.

5. This recognition is the start – or a start – of what we might now call Christian tradition. It is therefore within the framework of tradition that the Bible can be regarded as a holy book. What this means for tradition must wait for a later article.

Further Reading

There are loads of good books on the history of the Bible, but one I’d particularly recommend is Making the Christian Bible by John Barton (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997)

Two commentaries with very different views on 2 Timothy 3:16 are The Letters to Timothy and Titus by Philip H Towner (Eerdmans, 2006); and Pastoral Epistles by William Mounce (Thomas Nelson, 2000: Word Biblical Commentary

Finally, I must apologise that I can provide no reference, still less a link, for Calvin’s views – either his maxim about the reverence we owe to scripture, or the way he believed the Spirit informed Bible study. I spent some time searching the internet, and found several instances of people using the maxim to justify their approach to scripture (and some of people misusing it!) but no actual source. If any reader can find a source that I can readily link here, please let me know!

Introducing the Theological Engineer

 

What is a theological engineer? I’m guessing (hoping) that some of you may be reading this because you are wondering what I mean by that phrase. Theology is doctrines about God, framed as a science; an engineer designs, builds, or otherwise works with engines, for some definition of engine – most broadly anything ingenious – but that doesn’t get us very far.

Is it someone who designs gods? That is something writers of fantasy fiction do, with varying degrees of success. Terry Pratchett, one of the foremost fantasists of his time, designed a number of gods; while they worked well in their stories, within his Discworld setting, they don’t actually make very satisfying gods. Lois McMaster Bujold has created some much more believable gods in her Quintarian books; she makes some very astute theological comments both in her fantasy and in her science fiction writing, and I’d like to write an article for this blog exploring this. One day. (Don’t hold your breath!) But that’s not what I mean.

Is it someone who designs doctrines about God, or about gods? I’m inclined to say that more than enough of that goes on already, except that I probably shall be doing that at some point! But that is not what I mean, either.

I have called this blog The Theological Engineer simply because I shall be taking an engineer’s approach to theology.

An engineer is concerned with what works. Theory is important – many times in my career as an engineer I lamented the way colleagues got into difficulties because they didn’t understand the theory behind what they were doing – but not of prime importance. So I shall be looking at different approaches to understanding God, and asking “What works?”

An engineer is usually concerned with solving problems. Many people have problems understanding, or relating to, God; and these need solutions. But different people have different problems, and I hope to be able to address them without taking a “one size fits all” approach. (The maxim, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” aptly describes people who do take such an approach. This is apparently called Baruch’s Observation, but I don’t think it has any connection with the apocryphal book of the Bible!) However, much of my theological thought at present is shaped by the particular problems suffered by my wife, Temple Cloud, and I may sometimes present solutions that are relevant to her, but only of peripheral interest to most other readers.

Finally, the title reflects my own background. I am a Christian; my degree was in electrical science; I worked as an engineer for most of my career; I then took another degree, this time in theology. I sometimes get the impression (although I have no actual data to back this up!) that people with strong religious belief, but a scientific turn of mind, often pursue careers in the applied sciences – engineering, medicine, and so on – rather than confront a perceived conflict of world-view by studying, say, physics (where cosmology might conflict) or biology (where evolutionary theory might conflict). This is not me! I am a scientific rationalist, but I recognise the limitations of science in describing the universe (another possible subject for a blog post, perhaps).

My scientific background, however, means that I am not a fundamentalist. Indeed, I find that many Christians, given a doctrine that the Bible is the Word of God, place on the Bible a burden of authority that I think it cannot bear. This is a hobby horse of mine, and will probably be the subject of numerous posts, if the blog survives long enough.

On the other hand, some schools of liberal Bible scholarship lose sight of the Bible’s status as a holy book. They sometimes seem to be studying a document, while at the same time forgetting why it is worthy of such detailed study, and I hope to write on this subject, too. For the moment, suffice it to say that being a scientific rationalist means that I don’t pre-judge things to be impossible simply because they are outside modern (post-Enlightenment) scientific experience. Still less do I believe that if something cannot be proved by science, one must regard it as false. (I am told that this view derives from Logical Positivism, which regards such questions as meaningless; but to me, this attitude is more aptly described as Illogical Negativism!)

Other posts may re-work essays from my theology degree, or respond to books or articles I have read.

Whatever the subject, please comment! Ask questions! If you disagree with me, say why (but please recognise that “because the Bible says so” is not a valid reason. I may also need to write a blog post explaining why not...)

My aim is to post something here roughly once a week, but I am not committing to a fixed schedule. Most of the posts will be about theology, but I may occasionally include something about music, or science, or jurisprudence.