Stone's Fence

Continuing my personal axioms for good biblical interpretation, not explaining, just stating. If you want to hear more, feel free to e-mail me (link at the end of my profile) and I'd love to talk about it.

1. Don't be an F-16 Fighter jet on the gunnery range. (worth a separate article)
2. "Theology" is not defined as whatever is left when I'm finished; i.e. "meaning" is not defined as "that which has survived my exegesis"
3. Don't be the Hindenberg, DO be the Goodyear Blimp(worth a separate article)
4. DO be the Memphis Belle (worth a separate article)
5. When in doubt, work on the textual problems, grammar, and syntax. In the end, it's all text, grammar, and syntax.
6. Do a word study on the word you think you understand the best. You'll be surprised.
7. All interpretations eventually fail. The goal is to fail productively. If you do not know what a productive failure is, you have not ever been in ministry
8. Beware of becoming the kind of interpreter who goes down deeper, stays down longer, and comes up drier than anyone else.
9. The best commentary on any book of the Bible has probably already been written, the author is dead, and the book can be found used. Insight is not a function of recency, nor is stupidity.
10. The Law of the Third Sermon: Don't preach the first sermon you find in a text. Everyone else has beat you to it. Don't even preach the second sermon you find in a text. The really good preachers have already done it. The good sermon will at least be the third one you find in a text...
11. Humanly speaking, never forget who is the enemy and who is the client. We work for the client, and against the enemy. We want to help the clients and defeat the enemy. For example, Fundamentalists, people too conservative for our tastes, Pentecostals, etc. are CLIENTS...The enemy (ecclesiastically speaking) is...relavistic theology that denies that God effectively reveals absolute truths (i.e. all most all forms of liberalism)!
12. The parts of the Bible that have the best archaeological and extra-biblical support are typically the parts that are the most trivial
13. Invariably, the most vexing textual and translational problems will occur in the most precious and beloved passages of scripture.
14. Forget the "kernal and husk" theory of "cultural packaging" and "timeless truths." From a certain point of view, it's all kernal, and it's all husk. Again, the connection between God's truth and the cultural forms it takes in Scripture is not a proportion but a relation.
15. On relevance: Our job is translating God's word to make it accessible, not transforming God's word to make it acceptable. We hope to change humanity, not the Bible.
    

I'm a Bible scholar, and "correct" interpretation is what I spend my days fretting about. I caution students that wrong principles of interpretation will cause them to use the Bible in ways that are harmful to those whom they teach. At the same time, I see lots of examples of "correct" interpretation that is simply devoid of insight, lacking power, and somehow missing the thrust of scripture. So I began to wonder just what goes into interpretation that really works. While there are a great many very good rules for proper interpretation in all the hermeneutics manuals, over time I have developed some axioms of my own that have helped me to avoid a lot of grief and folly in handling the Bible. Over about 15 years I shared these sporadically with students, and then one day about 3 years ago decided to start compiling these little aphorisms into a list. To my surprise, the list ran to over 35 items, so I think I'll share a few here, without commentary, just stating the axiom.

1. Never do with God's words something I would not want done to my own,
2. The greatest barrier to understanding the Bible is thinking I understand the Bible
3. Don't cling to any belief or opinion that cannot survive one reading of the Bible, including beliefs and opinions about the Bible
4. Read the whole Bible through at least once during seminary, and regularly thereafter.
5. Exegetical methods are not means by which we control the Bible; they are means by which the Bible controls us
6. Beware of illiterate exegesis. Interpretation is reading in depth. Reading is not shredding, ripping, tearing apart, or otherwise doing violence upon a text. Interpretation is not predatory. It is READING, an act of hospitality and receptivity. Study and analysis are just preparing the house to receive our beloved guest.
7. On the human & divine dimensions of Scripture: this is not a proportion like 60/40, 50/50, it is a relation, it's 100/100.
8. No scholars or interpreters are as stupid as their detractors make them look. Remember that when you read them or debate them.
9. Every interpreter is a human being. You are not having a war with ideas, but a conversation with people, even the dead ones. People whom God loves and for whom Christ died, and whom you might see in heaven one day. Find their picture. Put it in front of you when you analyze their ideas.
10. Despite the hype, "presuppositions" really don't end up counting for much in most exegesis. People with all the wrong presuppositions often read the text profoundly, and people with impeccable presuppositions can miss insights the size of elephants. Bottom Line: If you want more profound interpretation, you have to be a more profound person.
11. The value of reading the Bible in Hebrew and Greek is that you get so confused and lost, you forget what the text was supposed to mean...with the result that...
12. If we get sufficiently confused and disoriented, we stand a good chance of temporarily losing track of our own agenda and ideology, thus simulating objectivity. This is the principle value of learning Greek and Hebrew

(continued) Most telling are the similarities tying today's church to medieval Christianity. Take the Bible. Despite the stereotypical "cartoon history of the church" taught in most schools, it remains true that medieval lay persons knew the Bible less from reading than from stained-glass windows, crude dramatic sketches, and the pronouncements of celebrity clergy authorities. Fanciful legends about saints and biblical characters filled in the gaps. Medieval theologians augmented the biblical text with a growing jungle of notes reconciling a top-heavy church tradition with the text's stark witness. Glosses bred like cats and so engulfed the biblical text that the very pages appear a labyrinth of marginalia. Worse, the benefits of a universally accepted translation, the Latin Vulgate, dissolved in the deep corruption and error that crept into copies of the Bible in common use. The text itself became unstable and uncertain. An authoritative Bible loses its coercive force if nobody knows just what it says.
Theoretically, the protestant reformation fixed all that. Now lay persons read the Bible for themselves. Protestants, we are told, interpret the Bible in its plain sense, freed from the labyrinth of annotation. Much of this is easy stereotype but much is fair. How much of the medieval experience parallels the contemporary church? More and more, we do not experience scripture in its unfolding, developing context, but on the gigantic illuminated screens, where the selected and edited passages, in just the right translation, freed from the burdens of contexts flash before our eyes, all thanks to the wizardry of PowerPoint--the stained-glass window of neo-medieval Christendom.
And we have our celebrities who establish the meaning of the Bible for the masses and proclaim the next crusade. How many Bible study groups end up studying, not the Bible, but the latest book by the current anointed celebrity expositor? And merely studying the Bible falls short! We require event-oriented programming that delivers not just God's word, but sensational experiences, God's word on steroids...Xtreme ministry. I have met people in great churches whose grasp of biblical truth stems as much from popular fiction as from the Bible itself. Again, our designer study-Bibles--has the Repeat Sex Offender Study Bible come out yet?--increasingly resemble medieval Bibles with their labrynths of glosses. And with so many translations of the Bible into English, I can quote the scriptures directly in class or from the pulpit and have the majority of the audience not realize it. They've got The Message and I quoted the New Living Translation. Have we have weighed sufficiently the impact of the babel of translations visited on a single tongue while other tongues still await their first? The value of the Bible derives precisely from its ability to shape and mold our thinking and discourse about grace. But how does that happen when Christians do not even share a common text? While we celebrate the Bible, our access to it becomes disquietingly oblique.
Which brings me to mystery. While medieval scholars wrestled over the relationship between the literal and spiritual senses of scripture, many just gave up and dove directly into mystery. "Spiritual" reading attempted an end-run, hoping that God would speak through the Bible without actually using its plain words. The Bible becomes more of an antenna than a message. When I read the reformers, I am struck by how unspiritual they sound to our ears. Luther's garrulous impiety shocks. Calvin's acidity would strip the paint off the fellowship hall of most churches. The faith of the reformation, in part, involved a liberation from "spirituality." The emotional works-righteousness of religious affectations yielded to faith, hope, and charity. But today spirituality is the Xtreme sport of jaded neo-medieval Christians for whom faith, hope and charity seem too confining. Eventually the medieval hunger for the exotic, combined with biblical and historical ignorance spawned a host of occult philosophies claiming custodianship over a truth concealed by a church protecting its power. Whether it be masonry, alchemy, Rosicrucianism or the Cult of Mary Magdalene (you know, the Disciple Whom Jesus Bedded?) you could not throw a rock into a medieval mob without hitting a self-styled practitioner of some forbidden art. Gnosticism is the cruelest tyranny exercised by the elite over the ignorant. In an occult/gnostic culture, the line between fiction and fact dissolves before micro-waved medieval fantasy like The DaVinci Code.
The medieval church confronted two defining crises. First, imperial Islam challenged the very existence of the church, and the church in response acquired the disquieting habit of answering challenges by "taking the cross" of crusading. But are we any better prepared to confront our own encounter with a re-energized Islam? Second, the seismic intellectual shift of the 13th century from a Platonic, "spiritual" worldview to one informed by the stark realism of Aristotle constitutes a paradigm shift dwarfing our current case of nerves over modernity. Fortunately for the medieval church, a thinker like Thomas Aquinas met the challenge, not by transforming the faith into something more palatable, but by translating its timeless truths afresh in terms comprehensible to the new worldview. Aquinas and his colleagues bequeathed a theological heritage that even the reformers grudgingly admired and shamelessly emulated, unleashing 800 years of philosophical, theological, and scientific advancement.
I am not sure neo-medievals are going to be so lucky.

A favorite indoor sport of the intellectual elite seems to be characterizing "this generation" or "this era," normally as a maneuver to undergird a cultural agenda. The recent drop-dead favorite seems to be "post-modern." The term carries a cachet of advanced thought, the bemused detachment of one observing great crises from outside, never committing to a "meta-narrative" lest one become ideologically co-opted.
Recently I realized what bothers me about the post-modernity thing. Tremors came as I savored Norman Cantor's Civilization of the Middle Ages but the eruption came as I finished the stellar new translation of Huizinga's classic The Autumn of the Middle Ages. What I don't like about the "post modern" is that "post" implies movement beyond, or forward, even bravely, when it increasingly appears we have gone back. Rather than "post-modern," our age seems one of medieval recrudescence. Huizinga tellingly branded the medieval era with "the passionate intensity of life." For medievals,

Every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness that joy and sadness have in the mind of a child...Honor and wealth were enjoyed more fervently and greedily because they contrasted still more than now with lamentable poverty...all things in life had about them something glitteringly and cruelly public. (Autumn, p. 1)