Getting Practical – Step 5 – Rinse and Repeat

If I were writing directions for reading the Bible (I guess I actually am writing directions for reading the Bible), I think I would be tempted to steal the directions from the back of a shampoo bottle.  That is lather, rinse, and repeat.  Or, once you finish the process, do it again.  If you are washing you hair, repeating the process is supposed to guarantee cleaner, shinier hair.  If you are reading the Bible, repeating the process guarantees greater accuracy, comprehension, and confidence.

Remember that we said the goal of Bible reading is two fold, to find the meaning and to explore the significance.  In four easy steps we reviewed the process of finding the meaning and now we are ready to move onto exploring the significance.  However, before we do, let me suggest that we take the time to rinse and repeat.

Now, you may be thinking that my process isn’t that great to begin with if you have to repeat it at the end.  It gets even worse when you find out that I think you should keep repeating the process indefinitely.  However, if you stop to consider the Bible readers task of finding meaning, you will understand why repeating the process is so helpful.

The Bible reader is supposed to make a guess regarding the author’s thoughts about a text.  Once that guess is made, there are two issues that need to be addressed, the accuracy of the guess and the confidence one can have in the guess.  The process we went through helped us make an informed and hopefully accurate guess, but, if we are honest, there is still so much left to consider that we have to be cautious attaching unbridled confidence to the guess.  What we need is to confirm our hypothesis and to gain confidence in its validity.

I think that the best way to do this is to simply repeat the process, but this time adding a little more depth at each step.  This is similar to what Grant Osborne calls the Hermeneutical Spiral.  That is, the process takes the Bible reader to greater degrees of precision and confidence with each revolution around the spiral.  Let me explain how I would take a second loop around my spiral, or, how I would rinse and repeat.

The first step was filling your whiteboard.  That means gathering all the information you know about the book and passage you are studying.  Now that I have been around the spiral once I have a lot of new information to add to my whiteboard.  Additionally I may want to go to some outside sources to try to add some new information.  For instance, I may want to read a Bible handbook or commentary to get a more full idea of the argument and flow of Isaiah.  Another way to add more information to my whiteboard would be to look for people who had different ideas about what the passage was about and to try to understand what they think.  There are really countless ways to fill your whiteboard again.  Don’t think that you have to know everything before you start the process again, but at least try to add some more information to the board as you start your second trip around the spiral.

The second step was determining your boundaries.  For your second trip around the spiral you may want to alter the limits of your passage.  You are still bound to limit your study according to the thought patterns of the author, however you may want to expand your study to cover several chapters that deal with similar content.  Or, perhaps you may want to constrict your boundaries and focus on a smaller part of the argument.  The real goal is to look at the passage from every angle to make sure that you haven’t missed any facet crucial the author’s argument or thinking.

The third step was getting organized.  To understand a passage you almost always have to work with some sort of outline in your mind.  On your second trip around the spiral you should take some time to investigate your outline.  Perhaps you can compare your outline with those found in commentaries and Bible handbooks.  I doubt all the outlines will be the same, so you job is to decide which one does the best job of reflecting the author’s thought process.  Or if you are feeling really ambitious, ramp up your outlining prowess by doing some sentence diagrams.  If you want more info on sentence diagrams I recommend Bock and Fanning’s book, Interpreting the New Testament Text.

Finally you had to look at the trifles.  There are countless ways to take a new look at the trifles.  A great place to start is to make a list of keywords and do a study of how they are used elsewhere.  Countless books, dissertations, and articles have been written to investigate the trifles.  It would take a lifetime just to do a detailed study of each word in Isaiah 30.   But remember that you don’t have to do everything on your second trip around the spiral.  Just look at a few more trifles and save some for the next time you rinse and repeat.

As you continue rinsing and repeating you will continue to refine your understanding of the text and to develop a deeper sense of confidence concerning your hypothesis.  Or perhaps, you may just realize that you were overconfident and decide to make some changes to your earlier guess.  Either way, it is the rinse and repeat part of the process that continues to spiral you closer to the author’s original meaning.

Getting Practical – Step 4 – Observing the Trifles

How well do you have to know something to “really know it?”  In high school I had to know 95% of it to got an A.  College relaxed the standard; as long as I knew 90% I still get an A.  Then again who really needs an A?  Perhaps a B or C would do, it’s still passing.

That mentality only works if you think what you are doing is unimportant.  When the stakes rise, your competency must rise as well.  If I am going into surgery I don’t want a surgeon who just passed, I want someone who goes the extra mile to make sure he gets it right.  In the story The Five Orange Pips, Sherlock Holmes says, “It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this, I have endeavoured in my case to do.”  Reading the Bible is important enough to merit the same attention to detail Sherlock Holmes gives his mysteries.  Because of this, it’s my endeavor to possess all the knowledge that is likely to help me in my work of interpreting Isaiah 30.

If you have bothered to make an outline of your passage, you probably understand the text better than 95% of the people in your church or small group.  But don’t be satisfied with being above average.  This next step is how I try to move from an adequate understanding of the text to an A+ understanding.  And to understand this next step, I again turn to Sherlock Holmes who said, “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.”

By trifles, I have in mind those smallest units of meaning, words.  Typically I can understand the gist of a passage without understanding all of the words and figures of speech used in it.  But it isn’t enough to just get the gist of the passage; I want to understand what the author was doing with every word and every phrase.

Now you may remember that in the last post I told you Isaiah 30 has 994 words in it.  This could be rather scary because you can’t imagine anything more time consuming, and frankly, boring, than grabbing a dictionary and doing 994 word studies.  Don’t worry.  I don’t have that much stamina either.  So, to save time, I start by making a list of things I don’t know.  Once I have my list, its goes through triage, where I try to make some guess about where to start.

Here was part of my list for Isaiah 30:

–       v. 2 – When did Israel seek shelter from Egypt?  Was this during the time of Joseph or is it later, perhaps contemporary to the time of Isaiah?

–       v. 4 – Zoan and Hanes – Obviously they are two places.  Probably known for being wealthy or powerful.

–       v. 6 – What do the beasts of Negeb have to do with anything?

–       v. 7 – Why call Egypt “Rahab who sits still?”   This cut down is a bit lost on me.

–        

They always say that the first step in overcoming your problem is admitting you have one.  Well, I have admitted it.  There are some things I don’t know about Isaiah 30.  So what’s the second step?  I say it’s finding the answers!  Let me tell you what tools I use to help me find these answers.

I primarily rely on 3 tools, each of which can be found in a study Bible.  The first tool is the cross references, which are in the inner columns of my Bible.  Their close cousin, a concordance, is the second tool and is found in the back of most study Bibles.  These two tools are helpful because they tell me if the terms I am struggling with are used anywhere else in the Bible.  For instance, the cross-reference for verse 4 told me to look at Isaiah 19:11 where I see that the princes of Zoan are foolish and they give Pharoah unwise council.  The concordance is even more helpful because it can tell me every time the word Zoan is used in the Bible.  However, most Bibles only have an abridged concordance in them.  The way around this is to simply go to www.biblegateway.com and search for Zoan.  If you have an iPod you can possibly even do this search while at small group.  Try to check your iPod secretly so no one will think you are rude and everyone will be amazed that you happen to “remember” that Zoan is mentioned 7 times in the Bible.

The second tool I use is a commentary.  This is almost like cheating, but in this context it’s okay to cheat.  On the bottom of your study Bible there will be a list of notes commenting on verses.  Start by scanning them to see if there is any useful information.  For instance, the notes in my study Bible told me that this trip to Egypt was contemporary to Isaiah’s time and was motivated by Judah’s fear of an Assyrian attack, in spite of God’s promise to defend his people.  It even gave me verses to look up to support their claim.  

Again though, the study Bible’s commentary section runs into the same problem as its concordance, brevity.  Sometimes I just need more information.  For this I turn to a larger commentary.  One of my favorites for the OT is the Keil and Delitzsch, though I admit it may seem a little dense to some because it often deals with the Hebrew language and it spends time responding to the work of other German scholars.  That said, Keil and Delitzch really helped with my third question about the beasts of Negeb.  The phrase could also have been translated “the water-oxen of the south” or the “work-horse of the south” and is most likely a figure of speech referring to Egypt.  Further, Rahab is a name that could also mean “boasting pride.”  So when viewed together, the work horse of the south is really a deception, they are in fact just braggarts who don’t really do anything.

Looking at the trifles is actually a lot of fun because it takes us more deeply and more confidently into the mind of the author.  I am starting so see how creative and sarcastic Isaiah can be.  I am getting a better idea of the setting he is writing in and the people he is writing to.  Plus, it gives me an excuse to wear my funny hat and monocle, while smoking a pipe and saying “it’s elementary my dear Watson.”

One last thing… Each time I gain new information, I need to revisit my whiteboard and revisit my hypothesis.  I have to take the small parts and fit them back into the whole.  So ask yourself, “does this new information change my hypothesis or just add further precision to it?”  In this case I think it added further precision.  In either case, we are ultimately still about the same business as Sherlock Holmes who said, “We balance probabilities and choose the most likely.  It is the scientific use of the imagination.”

And in case this talk about Sherlock Holmes has only served to wet your appetite, enjoy…

Getting Practical – Step 3 – Don’t be a Hoarder

If you are still keeping your whiteboard, it may be getting a little bit out of hand.  It started with everything you know about Isaiah.  But now that we have found the boundaries of the passage the whiteboard is overflowing.  That’s because Isaiah 30 has 994 words (that’s if you are using the ESV) that need to be added to the whiteboard.  Each word contributes to the meaning (author’s intended message), so each word needs to be considered.  For that matter, we might want to add grammatical markers such punctuation and indentation up there too, but I don’t have the stamina to count all the commas and periods.

I’m sure you see the problem; it’s information overload.  How in the world can we make sense of all this information?  We have to start organizing it.  Now, I know this may sound intimidating, especially if you don’t consider yourself to be a highly organized person.  But if you need motivation, watch an episode of Hoarders and you will understand how important organization can be.

Another thing that helps is that you don’t actually have to organize the information; you simply have to figure out how the information is organized.  Every time an author writes something he organizes all of his words and thoughts in such a way as to communicate the message he wants to communicate.  So really, the job is already done.  All you have to do is figure out how it is organized so you can think the same thoughts as the author.

The best way to figure out how information is organized by an author is to make an outline.  Most commentaries and study Bibles will have an outline for you, but I recommend going through the process of outlining the passage yourself first, and then comparing it with commentaries.  I have found that the process of outlining a passage is the single most helpful stage in the interpretive process because it forces me to look at what and how the author is communicating.

To outline Isaiah 30 I looked for some clues to help guide me.  Perhaps the most helpful clue is the use of transition words.  Words such as “therefore,” “but,” “however,” and several others indicate the author may be shifting his focus.  Another clue is a change in the author’s subject matter or argumentation.  A third clue that can be helpful is a change in the form of the writing, however there are some things we should be aware when we consider form.

The way your Bible is printed, including fonts, indentation, and paragraph structure, is an interpretive choice made by the publishers of your Bible.  Original manuscripts did not even provide spaces in between the words; much less did they use indentation and paragraph form to help their readers.  However, in modern English, form is an important part of how we read, so Bible translators have decided to make form part of their translation strategy.   When you use things like paragraph structure to influence your decision you should be aware that you are relying heavily on the work of the translators who went before you.  I don’t think that is a bad thing, but I do think it may help to get a second opinion sometimes.  That’s why I suggest not solely relying on one translation, but to compare several translations to help make your decision more educated.  That said, at Bible study I was relying on the ESV translators alone, so their decisions on for were all I had to go on that night.

Back to Isaiah 30.  As I read the passage I noticed what looked like 12 separate sections.  The first section was the first two verses.  They seem to be providing a charge against the “stubborn children” for seeking shelter from Egypt.  Verse 3 began with “therefore,” so I was immediately looking for a change.  To no surprise, there is a change.  Instead of telling the stubborn children why they are guilty, he moves to a discussion of the consequence of their actions.  Verse 6 starts with a change in form.  Rather than beginning with the poetic form, the first line is not indented and seems to be some sort of reference to the following poetic line.  That was a clue that told me something was changing.  However, when I read the following two verses I noticed the change was slight.  He is still discussing the consequences of trusting Egypt, however seems that there is a new sort of mocking tone the author uses.  Anyway, I now have 3 sections; 1-2, 3-5, and 6-7.

Verse 8 starts with another marker, “and now,” which tells me a new section is beginning.  This time it is a major switch in subject.  He is no longer speaking to the “stubborn people,” instead he is speaking about them.  Verse 9 starts with another marker, “for”, which explains further why this “rebellious people” are guilty.  Verse 12 starts with another marker, “therefore,” and begins telling us about the penalty that God will bring on them.  You may notice that verse 13 also has a therefore, but I decided to keep it with the section that starts in 12 because therefore is lower case, indicating that it is part of the sentence started in verse 12.

Verse 15 has two new markers.  One is an editor’s choice to insert a blank line between the end of 14 and the beginning of 15.  Obviously they think something new is happening here.  The other is the use of the words “For thus.”  It serves as a marker that a change is happening.  The author continues to talk about the penalty for the rebellion, but moves from a broken cistern illustration to one of 1,000 men being scared of one man.

I can tell this post is already getting long so I will spare you from having to look at the rest of the markers with me.  But before you let out a sigh of relief, recognizing the sections is only the first step.  The next is trying to guess how they fit together.  The good news is that I think this next step is done primarily using intuition.  All you need to do is decide how to organize these sections into an outline.  Just make sure that your outline keeps your sections intact and then try to show how they are related.  Here’s my outline:

I.               Condemnation of Israel

a.     The problem

                                                        i.     You trusted in Egypt without asking God’s direction (1-2)

                                                       ii.     Egypt is unable to profit you (3-4)

                                                     iii.     You are so dumb (I use the voice of the “hide yo kids” guy when I say this), because your plan is bad (6-7)

b.     The result

                                                        i.     A written condemnation to testify against them forever (8)

1.     Why they get a written condemnation (9-11)

                                                       ii.     Judgment which will collapse on them suddenly and harshly (12-14)

                                                     iii.     Judgment in military defeat or dispersion (15-17)

II.             The hope that still remains

a.     God will still be gracious (18)

                                                        i.     God will teach you the right way (19-22)

                                                       ii.     God will restore your bounty (23-26)

                                                     iii.     God will destroy judge evil (27-28)

                                                     iv.     God will cause his majestic voice to be heard (29-33)

Perhaps you can tell by how long this post is, I love outlining.  I truly think it is the most important step in understanding the author’s intentions in writing.  In fact there is probably more we could look at, but I am a merciful writer and know that that reading someone else’s outline can be boring.  Perhaps that is why some people never bother getting organized, they think it is boring.  But just remember, if you don’t take the time to get organized, one day everyone will be watching you in horror as Hoarders leads us through your life.  You don’t want that.

Getting Practical – Step 2 – Setting the Boundaries of the Text

An obvious truth is that in order to interpret a text is you must first determine what you are interpreting.  This may sound excessively basic, but I think failure to recognize this basic truth is one of the major reasons that many Bible readers struggle in settings such as church and small groups.  Bible readers often take a verse out of context completely unintentionally simply because they haven’t taken the time to consider how to determine the proper boundaries of the text.  Let me explain how I determined what to read in small group when going over Isaiah 30 last week.

On one hand, someone could rightly argue that each book of the Bible is it’s own unit and no verse or paragraph should be read without considering how it is fitting into the whole.  Certainly that is true, however, most writers construct their works into smaller segments that work together to form the whole.  The whole is made up of a collection of smaller units which each tell their own part of the story.  For instance, if I wanted to convince you to buy a motorcycle I may construct my argument by making three points; motorcycles are faster than cars, motorcycles are cheaper than cars, and motorcycles are more fun than cars.  In one sense, each of these points works together to accomplish my purpose of convincing you to buy a motorcycle.  On the other hand, each point contains its own argumentation and can stand alone.  Therefore you should be able to read and analyze my first section separately from my second section and determine the merits of each section of the argument before determining the effectiveness of the overall argument.

When you read any book you will understand the whole in light of the contribution of all its parts.  However, in most sermons and small group settings you will probably only be able to look at a part of the argument at any given time.  This is especially true with a book like Isaiah, which has 66 chapters.  Because of this, it’s your job to decide how to break up those parts in a responsible way.  This means trying to find a passage small enough that it is making a singular argument but not so small that you are pulling words or phrases outside of the argument that they are trying to make (which is often called reading a verse out of context).  This process is called “finding the boundaries of the text,” and it is the primary job of a discipline called discourse analysis.  If you want to read more about discourse analysis I suggest you read the final chapter of Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek by David Black.

With this in mind, I knew that in order to understand the passage we are studying in small group, I must quickly try to determine the boundaries of that text.  Our small group was looking at various verses in chapter 30, but we weren’t exactly reading the chapter as a whole.  However, I am convinced that authors do not write a series of unrelated verses, instead they are putting forward some unified discourse and it is my responsibility to read that discourse in units which correspond with the author’s argument.  Because of this, I tried to understand where the verses we were discussing fit into the larger unit of discourse and to determine where that unit began and where it ends.

Typically speaking, the smallest unit of argument is the paragraph, so it is helpful to understand argument flow by asking what each paragraph is saying and how they are linked to the preceding and following paragraph.  However, this time I had to slightly adjust that strategy for a couple of reasons.  One reason is because my Bible did not print this text in paragraph form, but instead in a poetic form.  Because the passage is in poetic form I knew to look for breaks in the form as one marker and shifts in the content matter of the poetry as the second marker. 

In addition to those markers, I realized that the selected verses that we were focusing on were spread throughout the chapter.  Because of this, my boundaries had to be large enough to encompass every verse we discussed.  I couldn’t, for instance choose verses 1-5 as my boundaries, when we were spending time in verse 15.  For this reason I decided to start by reading the whole chapter.  When I did, I immediately recognized that the chapter followed the model that I expected the whole book Isaiah to follow.  That is, the chapter started with a condemnation for faithlessness, followed by a penalty for that faithlessness, and completed with a promise regarding God’s faithfulness.  This was a clue that made me think that chapter 30 is probably a single unit for study because it is a completely contained subsection of the larger premise of the book.  However, just to make sure, I decided to read the end of 29 and the beginning of 31.  Isaiah 29:17-24 looks like promises of good times which will come to Israel because of God’s faithfulness, which sounds just like the end of chapter 30.  Isaiah 31:1-3 started with a condemnation of Israel for going down to Egypt, which is almost identical to chapter 30.  This confirmed my suspicion that Isaiah is in a repeating pattern where he condemns, pronounces judgment, and promises relief based on God’s faithfulness, and that Isaiah 30 is an iteration of this recurring message.

And now I have identified the boundaries of the passage I need to consider.  I know that I don’t need to start earlier or read later because chapter 30 is a contained unit.  Certainly, later I will want to expand my reading to ask how chapter 30 interacts with the other chapters, but for now I at least know that am reading a complete section of the overall argument.   Of course, when I say I know that, I actually mean I believe that there is substantial evidence, which indicates that my hypothesis concerning the boundaries of my text is reasonable.  It is certainly possible that as we continue our study I will have to revise that hypothesis.

Getting Practical – Step 1 – Filling Your Whiteboard

Where to begin?  Sometimes knowing where to begin is the hardest part of Bible study.  However, I think remembering how interpretation works will help.  Interpretation is the process of making guesses about what the author means, and then eliminating poor guesses while trying to move toward the most probable guess.  In that way interpretation is a lot like the work of a diagnostician.

Perhaps you have seen the show House.  I think the procedure for interpreting at text is kind of like House’s procedure for solving medical dilemmas.  Whenever he gets stuck he brings everyone into a room and he writes down everything that they know on the whiteboard.  Then his team sits around making guesses about what explanation best fits the evidence they have.  Typically, when the show begins they don’t know the answer and make a few wrong guesses, but each guess gives them a little new information.  At some point, they get enough information that House is able to figure out what the problem is.

I suggest reading the Bible  in the same way.  The first step is writing down everything you know on your whiteboard.  If you don’t have a whiteboard, don’t worry.  It’s just a metaphor.  But try to get what you do know in your head or on paper.  Some of the information will be more helpful than others.  Not all information has the same interpretive value.  But, like in House, you often won’t know how important something is until you get into you process of making guesses.

So how did I use my “whiteboard” in Bible study?  I wish I could say that I read the entire book of Isaiah first in order to try to answer a few preliminary questions such as, “who is writing?” who was Isaiah written to?” what is the author’s overall goal?” and “how does my passage contribute to that goal?”  However, we were looking at only a few verses in chapter 30 of Isaiah and I only had 45 minutes to gain my bearings and try to understand what is happening in this passage.  So time constraints required I find a shortcut.

This is where a good study Bible would come in very handy.  Most study Bibles have a section before each book of the Bible which will tell you the author, the audience, and give you a summary of the purpose and argument of the book.  And perhaps most helpful of all, it will give you an outline of the book so you can see how your text fits into the whole of Isaiah.  However, I had loaned my study Bible out for the night, so I was without this tool to work from.  In this case, you have to just go with what you can remember.  That’s okay though because interpretation is about making guesses, and as we dig deeper, I may have to revise my guesses anyway.  I simply want to take in as much information as possible to help me make the most informed guess possible.

I personally went into the reading of Isaiah 30 with rather little knowledge of the book as a whole.  I have read it before, but not recently and I have never studied it in much depth.  However, I did know a few things that were helpful.  First, I knew that Isaiah is a prophet and generally speaking, most of the prophets are doing the same thing.  They are condemning Israel for failing to live faithfully before God, announcing judgment for that failure, and promising that God would be faithful to restore them in spite of their failures. 

One other thing I noticed was that my Bible did not organize the text in typical paragraph form.  Instead, I saw that most of Isaiah 30 was written in poetic form.  I know that Hebrew poetry typically uses a feature called parallelism.  The poetic form of the printing suggests that I should be reading the text slightly differently than I would read other texts.  For instance, I know that sometimes parallelism will state one line and repeat the same thing in a slightly different way in the very next line.  In fact, parallelism can be used in a variety of ways, but it typically involves two lines, which are closely related to each other in some way.  Also, noticing this form tells me to look for non-literal figures of speech and pay attention to how lines are corresponding with each other.   

Noticing the poetic form goes very well with something else I know about the prophets.  I know that most of the prophets are not presenting information in a propositional way, but instead are using various kinds of imagery or historical examples in order to affect the emotions every bit as much as they affect the mind.  Therefore, I know that I should focus on how the text seeks to affect me emotionally as well as intellectually.

To be honest, my whiteboard has a little more on it that this, but for the sake of brevity I am not going to put everything I know about Isaiah in this blog.  The trick is, the more I read the Bible and the more I hear sermons and read books, the bigger my whiteboard becomes.  I don’t have to have a full whiteboard to understand the author’s meaning.  But having a full whiteboard helps me gain confidence that I have actually gotten there.  That is because the more I know, the more equipped I am to rule out bad guesses and to make good ones.  However, even with this little bit of information that I have already shared, I am able to make a first guess about what I will see as I read Isaiah 30.  I am going to start with this very basic hypothesis: Isaiah is going to have a message that is both condemning and conciliatory and that reading him correctly will require that I not only understand this propositionally, but I seek to understand the emotional component of his text as well.    

Getting Practical – Some Preliminaries

This week at small group someone asked that I post an example to show how I interpret a passage. Because we were working through Isaiah 30, I am going to show how I approach Bible reading using that passage. My own process actually consists of several steps, so to keep the posts short, I am planning on writing a separate post for each step in my process. However, before I get started, I think it may be helpful to mention a couple of preliminaries.

1. The Goal – I see good Bible reading as a two step process. The first step is to find the meaning and the second is to evaluate its significance. The search for meaning is a primarily historical search where I try to understand exactly what the author was seeking to communicate and why. E. D. Hirsch describes this as a “re-cognition of the author’s meaning.” Evaluating the significance is to ask the question, “so what?” There are countless ways one can approach significance, but I am particularly interested in how this informs my overall theology and how I personally should respond to the text.

2. The Method – E.D. Hirsch, the author most famous for the meaning and significance distinction, claimed that there was no method ever created that could reliably bring a reader to the meaning of the text. Instead he claimed “every interpretation begins as a guess and ends as a guess, and no one has ever devised a method for making intelligent guesses.” For the most part, I agree with this. I begin with reading the text and making a hypothesis about what the text is about. It is actually impossible to read a text and not make a hypothesis about the meaning. However, I think it is important to point out that there are some things we can do to make those guesses more intelligent. I will try to demonstrate how I believe my method can help make those guesses more intelligent.

3. Being Realistic – Because interpretations are guesses, I have to admit I cannot be 100% sure I have accurately and precisely arrived and the author’s own thinking concerning the meaning. In fact, there are many times that I will recognize that there are multiple possibilities regarding the meaning of a text. Hirsch states, “sometimes the arguments for two interpretive hypotheses are so strong and our knowledge so limited that a definite decision is impossible.” However, we must remember, there is a right answer, and that right answer is based on the thoughts of the original author. Hirsch continues, “The aim of validation, therefore, is not necessarily to denominate an individual victor, but rather to reach an objective conclusion about relative probabilities.” I must remember that I am working in probabilities and therefore must remain humble about my hypothesis while at the same time seeking an objective conclusion. This will require a willingness to constantly revise my hypothesis in order to make it either more accurate or more precise.

Bible Reading and a Tarot Deck

Last weekend I thoroughly enjoyed a trip to Washington, DC.  The sight seeing portion of the trip consisted of a couple of museums and a trip to the National Cathedral.  If you have never seen the National Cathedral, you should.  It is beautiful and it is huge.  I have friends near DC who tell me they regularly go there to find a place to read the Bible and spend some time reflecting and praying.  There aren’t many places as well suited for that type of day retreat as the National Cathedral.

One of the interesting things about the cathedral is the number of chapels within the cathedral.  I would guess that there are about 15 different chapels throughout the building.  They are all different sizes but follow a basically similar layout, as if they were designed to house churches of all different sizes in the same building at the same time.  It seems that the intention is that you can go anywhere in the building and find a spot that is just right for your worship needs.

Interestingly, the church seems to view Bible reading and church architecture in a similar manner.  The National Cathedral sold a $0.50 tract called “The Bible: a book about us, a book about God.”  In the tract the author says this:

It may sound like fortune-telling, but don’t let that worry you.  Let the Bible fall open in your lap and start there.  If you don’t find something that speaks to you, let it fall open to something else.  Read it as though it were as exotic as I Ching or the Tarot deck.  Because it is.

I assume that most of the people reading this blog would bristle at this statement.  Comparing Bible reading to fortune telling seems to border on the blasphemous.  However, I think that many Bible studies, and many sermons for that matter, operate in the exact manner this tract prescibes.  Similar to walking into the National Cathedral and looking for a chapel to suit their needs, it seems that many Bible readers open up the Bible and begin looking for something that “speaks to them.”

Certainly, the desire to have the Bible “speak to you” is from the greatest intentions.  However, the tarot deck approach to Bible reading actually hinders our ability to hear what the Bible has to say.  That is because when one opens the Bible and looks for a some exotic verse, they are rarely as concerned with the author’s intention as they are with the verse’s impact.  And when the author’s intention is lost, any basis for a claim on valid understanding of meaning is lost with it.

Instead, we must train ourselves to let the Bible speak on its own terms.  Rather than beginning with our own needs, we should first look for the aims and purposes of the author.  This means not looking simply looking for a favorite verse, but taking the time to understand the author’s argument.  While perhaps lacking the exotic feel of reading a tarot deck, old-fashioned, meat and potatoes, authorial intention is the only tried and true manner for letting the Bible speak to you.

The Wisdom of Puddleglum

Yesterday I went on a road trip to Washington, DC. And as is my custom of late, I was able to listen to an audiobook to help pass the time. For this trip I listened to one of my all time favorites, The Silver Chair, by C.S. Lewis.  This is the fourth book published in the Chronicles of Narnia (6th chronologically), and quite possibly, my favorite.

I was pleased, and quite surprised to hear that Puddleglum the Marshwiggle was able to shed a considerable amount of light on the topic of my last post.  If I were king of Narnia I think I would have him renamed Puddleglum the Wise.

The witch had bewitched Eustace, Jill, Prince Rilian, and Puddleglum and was seeking to convince them that the only reality was the reality that they could see.  Each of these four were from the Narnia, but had been captured by the witch and were being held, in her kingdom, deep underground.  A series of events led them to realize that they needed to get back to Narnia, but the witch intended stop to their quest for freedom by undermining their confidence in reality.  They told her of their beautiful world filled with grass, trees, and air… the sun and the moon and stars, and most importantly Aslan.  However, for each of these things, the witch responded by convincing them that they were all just figments of their imaginations, attempts to dream of a world better than that which they were in.  She wanted them to believe that the only reality was the reality that they were presently in.

Puddleglum however, had a moment of great lucidity and responded to the witch –

Puddleglum

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and starts and Aslan Himself.  Suppose we have.  Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.  Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world.  Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.  And that’s the funny thing, when you come to think of it.  We’re just babies making up a game if you are right.  But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.  That’s why I am going to stand by the play-world.  I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.  I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.  So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for the Overland.  Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

I say the same to Bertrand Russell and his world of “unyielding despair.”  If that is the real world, and the Bible is but a play world, the Bible “licks the real world hollow.”  And it is my plan to spend my life looking for the world of the Bible, were sin is defeated and I can be made right with God.

Fallen

I am stealing a post from a blogger named Justin Taylor.  I saw the video (@ 4 min), then read the quote from Bertrand Russell (the philosopher who wrote “Why I am Not a Christian”), and found them both to be very though provoking.

The video portrays a little meteor falling to earth. During his fall he goes through a range of emotions as he realizes that his own death is coming. All of the personality and emotions of the meteor are asking you to see the world through his eyes.  In fact, I think it goes beyond seeing the world, and begs you to see your world through his eyes.

As the video ends, you find yourself asking, “how should I view my own impending death?” This video presents a romantic viewpoint, emphasizing the “enjoy the ride” mentality.  Justin Taylor points out that the realist viewpoint is more bleak.  When one considers that their life is without meaning and purpose, they are drawn into a state of “unyielding despair.”

Fallen from Sascha Geddert on Vimeo.

The realist approach of “unyielding despair” as told by Bertrand Russell:

… but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

—Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903).

I am sure that you picked up on the fact that Bertrand Russell is no Christian.  What I find most amazing his that he would suggest that the “soul’s habitation” be built upon the foundation of such “unyielding despair.”  I find such a request to be too great, both for the sake of logic and for the sake of my soul.

40 Questions

Robert Plummer has written a helpful guide to interpreting the Bible.  He asks a series of 40 questions and gives a brief but helpful answer to each of them.  I haven’t read the whole book yet, but what I have read is helpful.

Here is his introduction to question 28 – How do we interpret proverbs?

Soon after our first child was born I received an email from a friend in which I was challenged to “claim the promise” of Proverbs 22:6 (“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it”).  Is this in fact a “promise?”  If, upon reaching adulthood, my daughter were to turn away from the Lord, does that meant that ultimately my training is to blame?  Rightly understanding the genre of proverbs will enable us to answer these questions.

I think that is a fun introduction which highlights how important it is to understand the genres of Scripture.  If you want a quick guide to genres, as well as many other questions about interpreting the Bible, this book is helpful.