Intimations of Revelation from Recollections of Early Childhood
1998
I have some interesting reflections on my understanding of
the Bible in my early years. For
instance, I grew up “knowing” that I could never take any one verse of the
Bible at face value or in its plain sense.
I always had to look up every other relevant Scripture and make sure
that my first reading did not contradict any of these other verses. I would take the “clearer” statement (which
was interestingly always the statement the Wesleyan church and my family
believed) and then reinterpret any other passages as necessary. If the subject was women in ministry, for
example, Galatians 3:28 always won out as the “clearer” verse over and above
“obscure” verses like 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.
Another interesting thing about holiness preaching I heard
as a child was the use of types and shadows.
I was fascinated by the fact that the scarlet cord in Rahab’s window, the guarantee of her salvation, was a type
of the blood of Christ which saves us. I
thrived on all these types. I yearned to
know how everything in the Old Testament tabernacle had a New Testament
parallel and how all the Old Testament feasts corresponded to key events in the
Christian dispensation. When I first
learned of Augustine’s interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan
(Christ as the Samaritan, the inn as the Church, etc...) I was enthralled. I remember thinking to myself, “I wish I was
as smart as the saints who could figure out what all these Old Testament things
were really about.”
In my growing up years, a lot of Scriptures were strikingly
relevant to the present. I learned, for
example, that Magog in Ezekiel 38 actually referred
to the
When I went to college and there received a call to
ministry, I wanted to pursue systematic theology rather than Bible. To me, theology was where I could really make
a contribution on the hard questions -- proofs for the existence of God, how
the Trinity worked, how Satan could come to be in a world God had created. The Bible, however, did not peak my interest
so much, because I thought I already knew what it meant. Although I may not have admitted it, interpretation
for me was simply a matter of seeing the theology I already had in whatever
verse I happened to be looking at.
And I had many verses ready for any particular
situation. I had verses I had learned in
Sunday School or from the little box my mother had
given me during a period of real fear. I
had no idea where most of these verses came from in the Bible, and I certainly
took no thought for their context. They
stood in their own right. In fact, that
is the way they are printed in the King James:
each verse stands alone, separate, unconnected to the verses around
it. So when my first girlfriend put
Jeremiah 29:11 on a card to cheer me up -- “For I know the thoughts I think
toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and
not of evil...” -- of course I never thought to look the verse up in Jeremiah
to see what Jeremiah was talking
about. Anyone could see what God meant by those words all by
themselves.
Somewhere in my college days, however, I was presented with
a real crisis. One of my teachers
claimed that in order to understand the Bible correctly, I needed to know
something about history. He was
suggesting that I had to know the context
of a particular Scripture before I could really understand what Paul or Luke
was trying to say.
In fact, the preaching around college was somewhat different
from that at home. The preachers would
tell me where Thessalonica was located in
But the question of history became a real struggle of faith
for me. Did one interpret the words of
Scripture in terms of what Paul himself was trying to say to the Thessalonians and,
more importantly, why he was saying it? For example, did the fact that only immoral
women cut their hair in Corinth have anything at all to do with how my
girlfriend should read 1 Cor. 11:6! Should I greet brothers in Christ with a holy
kiss, as 1 Thessalonians 5:26 indicated. My grandfather used to do so. If the Bible is one long book written by God
for all times transcending any particular cultural context, then we must apply
every verse to us directly today in the light of the words of the whole Bible, but without consideration of the historical
context. The English text of the
King James is fine. It is not necessary
to know any Greek or Hebrew.
The problem was that whether I liked it or not, I was beginning
to read the Bible differently. You see,
it had never really occurred to me before to think about what the words of the
Bible had meant in their original context to Paul himself or the Corinthians. I suspect the holiness preachers of the
earlier part of this century might not even have understood the question. I am not faulting them, merely highlighting
how different such a method is from what was the common practice back then. So when I learned how to read Scripture in
context, I soon found it difficult not
to read it that way. In fact, I found it
difficult to hold to some of my previous interpretations -- including many of
those I had picked up in my early youth and childhood!
I had thought, for example, that Isaiah 14:12 was about
Satan: “How art thou fallen from heaven,
oh Lucifer, son of the morning...” It
was the word “Lucifer” that had always determined how I read this verse. My eyes had focused only on that one word and
from it I had understood the meaning of 12-15.
I had never bothered to look at any of the rest of the chapter. Like I said, it is difficult to get any sense
of context in the King James because it lists each verse as a separate entity.
But when I started looking at the context, particularly in a
version that printed the text in paragraph form, even with headings, my
perspective underwent a radical shift. There
was no way around the fact that the whole chapter, both before verse twelve and
after, was originally about the king of
Babylon (see 14:4 and 20, for example) and in its original context had
nothing at all to do with Satan. There
was no indication whatsoever that Satan had ever entered Isaiah’s mind. Before this point in my life, I had never
given any thought to the historical city of ancient
College had opened a Pandora’s box,
and I was gradually becoming a “modernist.”
Now you should not think of this as a bad word. It is not.
Almost all fundamentalists, like most
atheists and evangelicals alike, are modernists. What is a modernist? It is someone who believes that there is an
objective truth out there we can know intimately and accurately. The atheists simply disagree on what that
truth is. Charles Stanley and Chuck Swindoll are modernists, as is Jerry Faldwell,
because they believe 1) that the original, historical meaning of Scripture is
the one which is authoritative and 2) that we can objectively know what this
original meaning was.
You see, whether we like it or not, everyone -- and I mean
absolutely every single individual on the earth -- has inherited a way of looking at the world. We do not choose this view at first. In fact, the
overwhelming majority of people will never even realize they have such a view,
although it affects every aspect of their life!
Both fundamentalists today and atheists are modernists because both of
them have absorbed this worldview from the modern culture of the last three to
five hundred years!
In this respect, Wesleyans come from a very interesting
position, actually quite different from much of fundamentalism today! Although we are gradually absorbing the
modernist viewpoint of our fundamentalist friends (to a great extent without even
knowing it, I might add), our church was originally “pre-modern,” not modern. I had never really thought of the Bible as
history, I had been a “pre-modernist.” I
had treated Scripture like a group of words whose meaning was interpreted in
the light of the theology I had grown up with, not in terms of their context.
So whenever I came to the word holiness or sanctification
in the Bible, for example, I automatically highlighted it and would relate it in
any way possible to the doctrine I had heard repeatedly in sermons. I did this because of the word, not because
of the original meaning of the verse in its context. As I said, the early holiness preachers rarely
looked at the context of the verses from which they preached. Without even realizing it, they followed a
method of finding individual verses and words which reminded them (whether by
catchword or analogy) of the theology they already believed. They used the Bible to illustrate their
theology rather than to derive it. Context
only entered the picture as it contributed to this process.
But once I began to ask what holiness and sanctification
meant in their original contexts, I suddenly found that many of these proof texts
were not actually about entire sanctification. For example, I once heard a sermon on Ps.
51:2: “Wash me throughly
form mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.” The sermon related these two statements to
two works of grace. First, one has their
sin acts forgiven in salvation, then one has the sin
principle, the carnal nature itself, cleansed. This is a nice presentation of the classic
Wesleyan position on entire sanctification.
Yet David himself would have had no comprehension whatsoever
of such a reading. First of all, Hebrew
poetry functions by a rule of parallelism -- say it and say it again. Verse two says the same thing twice, with
little distinction between the two statements.
For David, washing from iniquity and cleansing from sin were one and the
same request. It is also clear that the
role of the Spirit in the Old Testament is significantly different from that
which takes place after Pentecost. For
example, the Spirit of the Lord comes on Saul as he is attempting to kill David (1 Sam. 19:23). Saul keeps sending people to get David so he
can kill him, but seemingly against their will the Spirit keeps coming on them,
causing them to prophesy. Finally, Saul
goes himself, and “the Spirit of God came even upon him.” The real world of the Old Testament was
obviously far different than the one we had constructed from the verses alone
taken out of context.
What this sermon so aptly illustrates is that previously in
our history we were pre-modern, we did not think of the Bible in terms of its
original meaning. Rather, we thought of
it in terms of our theology -- our “tradition” of interpretation. Some will object to calling our background a
tradition. To them, they are simply reading
the Bible for what it means. I hope that
it is becoming clear that what we were really doing without realizing it was
applying a method we had unthinkingly learned and which we unthinkingly used. We took our doctrine and practices and read them into the text.
Because we live in a modernist world, there is something
very compelling to us about the modernist way of interpreting the Bible. It seems self evident that Paul’s actual view
of sanctification has more authority than the way a twentieth century preacher
can interpret the words out of context.
Yet the road of reading things in context leads us into some very scary
territory.
Take Isaiah 7, for example.
We all know verse 14: “Therefore the
LORD himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a
son, and shall call his name Immanuel.”
We know this verse because it appears in Matthew 1:23, where Matthew
refers to Jesus’ birth by the virgin Mary as its
fulfillment.
When we read Isaiah 7 through modernist eyes, however, we
become deeply troubled. The chapter is a
conversation between Ahaz, the king of
One might certainly note that Jesus did not in fact reach human
maturity until well over 700 years after this prophesy was uttered, and that it
is therefore true. But this interpretation
misses the point. If Christ is the sign,
then it does not bring any reassurance to Ahaz. It cannot hardly be
considered a sign to Ahaz if its fulfillment occurs
well over 700 years after his death. The
sign was not to me or the early church, it was to Ahaz.
You can see how troubling the modernist way of interpreting
in context can be. It leads to a host of
conundrums that even most of those practicing it have not fully realized. When the notion of culture comes into play, I
am faced with the fact that the world in which Abraham lived was startlingly
different from that of Isaiah and certainly from that of Paul. I cannot read the word Spirit the same in Paul as I read it in 1 Samuel. In fact, I cannot read the word Spirit in Paul the same way I read it in
Luke! Every individual book of the Bible
comes to be read in the light of its own context and each individual author’s
vocabulary.
The complexity has only begun. I look at the world as a sphere moving around
a sun. When I think of the first Russian
cosmonaut scoffing because he did not see God in orbit, I laugh and think, “Wow,
that fellow sure didn’t understand about where heaven is.” But
Then I think of Genesis 1, which was revealed to a culture
which had a view of the world even farther removed from mine. Here is a picture of a world consisting of
three stories: waters above, waters
beneath, and dry ground in the middle.
When I really try to understand the chapter in its cultural context, I
find myself no longer able to read some of the books on scientific creationism
with which I had grown up, for I realize that they are trying to mix together
apples and oranges. The way Genesis 1 speaks
of the world comes from a completely different “cultural language” than modern worldview
with which the scientific creationist approaches the text.
And so I am faced with an incredible problem. How can the words of the Bible, encased in human
language (which is always connected
with culture), not only relate to my world, but how can Paul’s “language”
relate to Moses or John to Isaiah? No
culture or individual will read the very same words of Scripture in the same
way. My world and my faith begin to
unravel.
In all such cases, my past gives a ready answer, “The gospel
is so simple that a man ‘though a fool, would not err therein.’” And somehow I agree. After studying Greek and Hebrew and earning a
doctorate’s degree in New Testament, I realize that I still do not know what
the “right,” historical meaning of much of Scripture is. Does it matter? Did it matter to the medieval peasant who
only heard the Bible read in Latin, a language he did not understand? Does it matter to the aged Wesleyan saint who
loves the Lord with all her heart -- or the same Baptist or Roman Catholic
saint? It was always interesting to me that
the Lord never seemed to “correct” these people. He just let that entirely sanctified Catholic
go on being Catholic. God somehow is
able to reveal himself to us all if we are willing, despite our understanding.
And so I find myself almost back to where I started, but
this time in a “second naïvete.” The illusion to Isaiah 35:8 illustrates the
principle so well. To begin with, I do
not believe that he ever quoted the portion of the verse exactly. The last seven words of the verse in the King
James read that “men, though fools, shall not err therein.” I have no doubt but that my father has heard
holiness sermons from this verse, for the “subject” on which these fools shall
not err is the “highway of holiness.” I can
almost reconstruct the sermon. God has
provided for us the way of holiness. “The
unclean shall not pass over it,” as the verse says, for the way of holiness is
only for the pure of heart. Yet it is
also a simple way to follow. Even a fool
will not err in it if his heart is right.
This interpretation of the verse is extremely
pre-modernist. It could hardly be
farther from what Isaiah meant. To begin
with, the term fool in Hebrew does
not mean someone who is not smart. It
means someone who is downright wicked!
And the word “err” here is meant in the older sense of wandering. The verse is actually saying that no wicked
person will wander onto this “highway
of holiness.” The NIV rightly translates
the phrase, “wicked fools will not go about on it.” Isaiah probably meant it in reference to the
return of
Yet God revealed a truth through it. Suddenly I realize that this is God’s normal
mode of operation, making the words of Scripture become the Word of God in accordance with our limited ability to
understand. Not to say that the Bible
was not the Word of God then, or that it is not the
Word of God now. It was, is, and will be
all of these. I have moved into the age
of the “post-modern.” For those of you
who already know this term, you do not need to be alarmed. I predict that the most notorious form of
postmodernism, which does not actually believe that objective truth or meaning
exists, will not turn out to be the only form in which it exists. Just as there would seem to be both a “Christian”
and a non-Christian modernism, there will also be a “Christian” and
non-Christian form of postmodernism.
In particular, there is a new term afoot known as critical realism. Such a “post-modernist” believes that truth
is “real”ly out there, but that we will always know
it from inside our heads. We will never
be able to see it objectively, although at times we may come closer than at
others. We will always see the truth from
within the “language game” we have inherited from our culture and from which we
can never completely remove ourselves.
Perhaps you can think of it as a rather late admission in the history of
the world that the Fall affects our minds as well as our
hearts. Most of us have been pretending
that we have a God’s eye view of the world -- and of the words of the Bible.
It is not that I go back to my pre-modern sense. In fact, I cannot do so for I have realized
the distinction between me and the text.
I cannot unlearn the distance between myself and Paul. And I really need the modernist
interpretation to ground me. Otherwise, I
am in danger of becoming a David Koresh. I cannot use God’s commands in Joshua to
exterminate evildoers as permission to shoot off homosexuals, for Christ has
told me to love my neighbor (and I think I have understood this injunction fairly
well, although not perfectly). The
original, historical meaning remains a fixed point of sorts, the bridge from
which my individualistic, “spiritual” reading bungy
jumps. In the case of the Koreshes and Jim Joneses of the world, the cord has snapped,
and they have tumbled to their deaths.
I take courage from the pre-modern interpretations of the
New Testament itself. Look at Matthew
1:23, which I have already noted. It is
no longer a problem for me that Matthew does not read Isaiah from a modernist
perspective. To be honest, my problem
consisted in part because I was not modernist enough, for what Matthew means by
“fulfilled” is not the same as what I as a modernist would think it means. Aristotle, for example, spoke of the watering
of the earth as the “final cause” of rain.
To me in my present perspective, the watering of the earth is not a
cause of rain, it is a result. How arrogant of me to assume that Matthew had
to follow my rules on what the word fulfill means.
As my forefathers, the New Testament authors gave the Old
Testament words fuller meanings in accordance with their true theology. This was
perfectly acceptable. It was perfectly
legitimate for Paul in Galatians 3:16 to make a big point out of the singular “seed”
in Genesis 17:19 even though it clearly refers to all of Abrahams plural, physical descendents in
Genesis. It was perfectly acceptable for
Matthew to consider Jesus’ return from
So where is the
In our pre-modern days, our bungy
cord was tied to our tradition, and this was a very fixed point indeed. In postmodernity in
its worst form, however, there is no fixed point. Have you ever heard anyone say recently, “Well,
it means that to you.
It means something different to me.”
With our Living and Amplified Bible, we do indeed pave the way for God’s
direct revelation to individuals, and this is great, needful, and important.
But where is the bridge that holds the individual from the
abyss below? I do not think that a
person needs to know Greek or Hebrew to find God or get to heaven. As long
as our theology is okay, God can use any old version to reveal the truth to
us. Whether we admit it or not, this is
what goes on most of the time anyway. But
if our theology comes from the Bible, then it must come from the original
meaning, and this you cannot get from an English translation. In fact, you may not even get it from reading
the Bible in Greek and Hebrew if you do not know some history.
To be honest, our history as a
church puts us in a unique position to lead the church into the age of postmodernity. On
the one hand, we need theology makers who have passed through the fires of
modernism intact, taking with them a sound theology based upon the original
meaning of Scripture. Our pastors should
be aware of these categories. They
should see these distinctions, but their work will not so much be in teaching
their congregations the original meanings.
Frankly, they have almost never done this anyway. What is most important for them is to know
the core theology and to be able to apply it in preaching and teaching. This is what has always been most important
for the people of God. His Spirit will
do the rest.