Morals : Discussion on using the Bible cont.

Continuing my list of 7 things I believe are true and important qualifications when using the Bible as a moral compass.

4. God is super smart, so all the important things will be said so often in so many different ways so that even us dummies can get the message. There is some controversy over the second part of this. Probably academics express the topic as “the perspicuity of Scripture” Some will say one needs experts – say priests or TV evangelists or the Church hierarchy to explain what it really means. For an amusing exposé of this and other foibles of human religion I recommend Terry Pratchett's novel “small gods”. The other side of the academic argument takes the view that the Bible is written so that anyone can safely use it as a guide even though the greatest scholars can spend all their lives studying it and still not fully plumb its depths.

I say that the perspicuity of scripture follows from the character of God. If God wants humans to understand certain things, then given he possesses absolute intelligence and absolute knowledge, he will know how to get his message across!

Yes, before you accuse me of being simplistic: I do know about the 'deconstruction' school of thought. I just believe they are wrong!

Think about it: they even refute themselves. Deconstruction is largely derived from Jacques Derrida's 1967 work “Of Grammatology”. If I de-construct say his book and say that it has no intrinsic meaning and proceed to say that to me it means something else entirely, deconstructionists will doubtless get very annoyed, giving away that in practice they do believe that words have an intrinsic meaning.

The plain fact is that we use language to convey information. The whole point of being able to “speak XYZ language” is that we can understand what a speaker of that language is trying to convey and conversely speak in such a way that we can convey our meaning to our auditors or readers. Human society and cooperative endeavour would cease if that were not the case!

So I stick with this: words mean something, and mean more or less the same something to all people who use the dialect in question!

So I say:

a) it is just a given that God can get his message across to the average human using human language.

b) Given God's character of being beneficent and truthful he will do so – at least to the extent that people want to hear his message. For us modern English speakers, there are a number of reputable Bible translations in our language, so it follows that it is possible for us to safely use the Bible as a guide to the things God intended to convey by it.

5. God is a master of language, so he might use poetry, hyperbole, sarcasm and the whole range of linguistic tools that even ordinary humans use. Thus 'literal' interpretations are obstinate folly.

If I sound a bit harsh her it is because I have been driven to it by Christians who act as though God is not as smart as the average human being!

Even people of below the average intelligence manage to use figures of speech. It is part of language!

They may use hyperbole: “Everyone is catching the 'flu this winter”. They are not claiming that literally everyone is catching it. Their audience do not think for a moment that they are. Even if they do not know what the word hyperbole means, they still use it and understand it!

They may use sarcasm: “Well that was a clever thing to do” in response to someone doing something silly. Their hearers understand perfectly that they are actually saying that it was emphatically not a clever thing to do!

And so forth … the point is that God is smart enough to use figures of speech for added impact. Don't be crassly literal in reading the Bible!

Again humans don't always write in prose. Down through the ages poets have managed to use words to reach through to their hearers emotions. They have often brought about significant social change by so doing. It should then be no surprise that again God can do what humans can do with language. The Bible has bits that are poetry. Don't treat it as you would prose, you'll just miss the point.

Stories: yes even us humans – well admittedly the more talented ones! - use stories for didactic purposes. For a thousand years the epic poems of Homer sung by wandering bards around the Aegean fixed in the minds of each generation what it meant to be a Greek Citizen.

In recent history the effect of books, drama and films is too obvious for there to be any dissent from the proposition that stories can be a powerful tool. So don't be surprised that a lot of the bible is stories. Mostly it uses true stories, but Jesus made up brilliant yarns of which we only have the bare outlines in the “parables”.

But how do you interpret a story. Be it a parable, or a slice of historical narrative. I think myself that what we find in the Old Testament are very select scenes from history (edited by humans, yet under the providence of God, the selection God chose for us) which we are meant to learn from. we have to ask “what do we learn from this story?” not try to pull it apart to find proof texts.

What about the prophets? Was it them or God? Well the prophets frequently prefaced their words with “Thus says Yahovah” of course the false, cult prophets said the same. So we read of God denouncing the false prophets in terms like: “I did not speak to you”, “If you had really stood in my counsels you would have said XYZ instead” and frequently “you made it all up out of your imagination”. So the canonical prophets believed and claimed that the message they proclaimed was God's and not theirs and sooner or later their claim was recognised as being true. False prophets made similar claims but history proved them wrong!

Once again people (or more particularly Biblical scholars of a “liberal” persuasion) seem to think that God is not as smart as the average human! We use the saying “horses for courses” to indicate that one needs to pick the person suited to the needs of a particular task. What if God also knew this! At different times in history there were different situations each receiving a prophetic message tailored to that situation. What if God was smart enough to pick a prophet who was suited to that particular task. Then yes the message would be flavoured by things like the prophet's temperament, background, even family experiences. But far from making their message “human” these things merely fitted the prophet to respond all the better to God's leadings and deliver a message that was “from the heart” and simultaneously precisely what God wished to be conveyed.

For an example look at Hosea: His broken marriage and his continued love for his unfaithful wife enabled him to empathise with God's continued love for unfaithful Israel and then accurately proclaim God's appeal to Israel.

The point is this: we can rely on the prophets' messages as being from God. Discovering how it applies to our situation is the hard part and what we need to concentrate our efforts on.

6. Humans are at best fallible and at the worst lying, conniving, self deceiving, self-centred and nasty. So even the best people will sometimes misinterpret the Bible and the worst will use and abuse it to gain personal advantage. And there will be all stages in between.

No one is infallible. However in our everyday life that does not prevent us from relying on people.

We fly in aeroplanes, trusting the design and maintenance engineers and pilots (to name a few) for our safety. From time to time people in all these categories make mistakes that result in hundreds of people dying. We don't stop flying on that account but we do try to learn from these mistakes so that flying is safer in the future.

We should apply this model to using the Bible. Even good people will sometimes “get it wrong”. Jesus was continually pointing out how religious leaders in his day had misinterpreted the Bible. Our best response is not to throw the Bible away, but to learn from these and other human errors to interpret the Bible better.

Someone once said to me “True, figures can't lie: but liars can figure!” There are bad people in the world. Some of them twist the Bible to their own ends. Even Jeremiah back in the 7^th century B.C. voiced God's complaint: “How can you say, 'We understand his laws,' when your teachers have twisted them up to mean a thing I never said?” (Jeremiah 8:8 TLV translation). The danger is real. But again the wise course is not to give up on the Bible, but to observe due diligence.

7. Humans find being bad much easier and more attractive than being good, so our inner nature will be antagonistic to Bible teaching that tries to correct our faults.

The problem here is one of “intent”.

In some law cases, the intent of the accused person is important. Intent is a hard thing to prove or disprove, but in these cases the prosecuting and defence lawyers still try to do so. Often other words or actions by the person are examined for any evidence they might yield as to the persons inner disposition to the matter or person in question.

In understanding the Bible the intent of the reader or expositor is of great importance.

Because our human nature is frequently in opposition to godliness, even the best of us have a lurking desire to find in the Bible confirmation of what our human nature wants. This will make us blind to the Bible's condemnation of those things. The we assuage our conscience by seeing even stronger condemnation than really exists regarding other people's behaviour.

This human foible is one of the culprits in making the Bible seem unreliable to people who have seen or suffered from such hypocrisy. It's not the Bible: it's us! (that is at fault).

Yet again my solution is not to throw the Bible away. Rather when judging other people's interpretations of, or arguments from the Bible: examine their intent.

Even more importantly: we must check our own intent. If we go to the Bible for any reason other than to develop our relationship with God by learning who God is and how we ourselves can become more godly (and only second to that to instruct others) we have the wrong intent and that will lead us to misinterpret the Bible.