Understanding the Bible More Deeply

What are your expectations for this article? What do you think you will discover that I have written? It probably is not what you expect. If you expect something, then you have some idea what I have written before you have read it.

Likewise, if you have read the Bible a hundred times, or even just once, you will have some idea of what to expect if you read it again. Nevertheless, you will undoubtedly find something you didn’t notice the first time you read it.

But understanding the Bible more deeply doesn’t involve simply finding information you didn’t remember from reading it before as you read through it again. While that is part of it, there are some additional principles that are helpful for enhancing how you gain a deeper understanding.

First, reading the Bible over and over again is additive. It’s like pouring coffee back in the coffee maker and brewing it over and over again. It will get stronger each time you brew it.

Second, as you read, you will want to investigate information in passages that you didn’t investigate before that helps you understand the passage better.

Third, as you learn about what the Bible says, you must read it as though what it says is true. That means it will influence your philosophy and desires. This colors what you read and frames it the way the Author of the Bible intended instead of what you intended the times you read it previously.

Fourthly, as your mind and heart change, your ability to think in the terms of the Bible will change. I’ve discussed this before as categories. The greater your intelligence, the greater your ability to apprehend these different categories.

Finally, your understanding will increase as you put into action what you learn from the Bible.

I will write in more detail on these in future articles, but I wanted to introduce this series to you beforehand. While I will be writing in more general terms, I do want to make known that what has instigated this is a desire to counter a tendency for people to engage the Bible on a more superficial level. Particular strains of this are as follows:

• Many people fear all theological debate as somehow unnecessary. Some theological debate is indeed unnecessary. However, there is plenty of deadly theological error that goes unchallenged because people won’t internalize convictions that counter rank heresy. If God truly saves people, some theological battles are important lest people unwittingly engender a lack of faith.
• There are people who believe that some things cannot be understood because they cannot understand them. There may be some things that we cannot understand, but I assure you that we can understand far more than many of us think. Where even great theologians have chalked some things up to “mystery”, many of these mysteries are understandable because God has revealed them to us and has given us the Holy Spirit to help us understand what the Bible says.
• People are sinful and simply don’t wish to learn what they are doing wrong so they can repent of it. On one level, they know what the truth is, but they cloak their eyes as though they don’t see it and either convince themselves that it isn’t true or isn’t understandable.
• People have a cultural sensibility or hold some popular philosophy that is challenged by the scriptures. They determine to understand what the Bible says only up to the point where it disagrees with their deeply-held unbiblical beliefs.

These patterns of misunderstanding the Bible are deadly to the Church because many of these kinds of people are otherwise faithful church members. Many people pray for a revival. The only way it will come about is if these patterns of unbelief are challenged and changed by a movement of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of Christians. That’s why I’m presenting this series.

“Not Everyone Agrees” – A Bad Argument

There’s an argument that I hear or read more often than not. It’s used typically by people who have a theological view that differs from the predominant view. A discussion will arise about some point regarding the predominant view and someone will step in with a view that disagrees with the predominant view. After a couple of arguments or explanations are bandied back and forth, if the person lobbying the opposing view senses that the argument is going badly for them, then they make this argument to give some sense of legitimacy to their position.

Now they don’t typically state the argument as a dry proposition.  Usually it will be worded something like this:

“All I’m trying to say is that there are people who disagree that this biblical passage means what you say that it means.”

Or:

“My point is that not everyone agrees on this theological issue.”

The argument that is insinuated is that the case for the legitimacy of a position is made by trading on the fact that people don’t agree. This argument assumes that the disagreement doesn’t include heresy. It also fails to make the observation that only one mutually exclusive truth is possible. Therefore, only one view can actually be true.

Now there are areas of theological disagreement that are legitimately subject to uncertainty based on different hermeneutical presuppositional structures. That’s a mouthful for most of you so I’ll break it down. Hermeneutics is the area of theological discovery that applies principles for understanding written text. This is where you investigate the writer and the audience, the sentence structures, the cultural context, figures of speech and idiomatic expressions, etc. When using these kinds of principles you often find a variety of possible meanings depending on how you apply the principles. Some passages are simply clearer than others. In order to understand more difficult passages, it helps to use facts learned in clearer passages to shed light on which meaning is most possible. As the Bible is studied and various facts understood, it helps to arrange these facts in logical associations to see the larger truth. Some facts depend on other facts and ultimately a small set of related facts will form that foundational truth for how you understand the rest of the Bible. This is your presuppositional structure.

Ideally, a presuppositional structure is formed by hermeneutical principles consistently applied to the scriptures. Unfortunately, most people will have a set of ideas already in place as their initial presuppositional structure and they will apply hermeneutical principles in such a way as to reinforce it rather than to change their presuppositional structure as consistently applied hermeneutical principles contradict their presuppositional structure. So where one presuppositional structure is suggested by the Bible, many people end up with different presuppositional structures.

Let me pick one of the less-controversial conflicts to use as an example. The Bible doesn’t say that the pets we have here in this world will be resurrected in the next. In fact, as far as the Bible is concerned only humans will be resurrected. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be animals of some sort in the hereafter. The Bible simply doesn’t focus on this. It’s not important. This is a consistent way of approaching the Bible. I’m looking at what the Bible views as important. I have pets that I enjoy as companions but I don’t expect to have them with me for all time and it’s not important to me because it’s not important in the Bible.

However, it is important to some people. They are particularly attached to their pets. Instead of letting the Bible guide their thinking on this, they import ideas that are foundational to understanding the Bible so that the Bible ends up meaning what the Bible never teaches. These ideas are things like, “God just wants me to be happy,” “Fluffy and Fido make me happy,” and “God gave me Fluffy and Fido to make me happy.” Therefore, they conclude, “God will give me Fluffy and Fido in heaven to make me happy.” So they read the Bible with this logic in mind as to how they should apply hermeneutical principles to understand the Bible. Since they don’t see a passage that specifically says that pets won’t be in heaven, they dismiss the passages that when taken together logically won’t allow that conclusion.

So let’s say there’s a discussion about animals in heaven. These passages are brought up. But the person who holds the pet-friendly hermeneutic is upset because people are saying that pets we have today like Fluffy and Fido won’t join us in the resurrection and be our companions for all time. They jump in with a contention against this. When the consistent hermeneutic is explained, they retreat to the argument I spelled out in the beginning of this article.

Believing that Fluffy and Fido will be resurrected isn’t specifically a heretical idea. It’s a bad one and an erroneous one, but we know that we have some church members who insist on these kinds of errors for their own reasons.

But there are people who espouse heresy who resort to that same argument. That’s why it’s important to point out that it’s a bad argument. Just because people disagree within the realm of orthodox Christianity doesn’t mean that both are true. Only one is true. The other is in error although not in a bad way. Dr. Al Mohler has developed his theological triage and wrote about it 8 years ago. It’s an extremely helpful tool for analyzing theological error.

Just because people can disagree on one level that carries some legitimate uncertainty doesn’t mean that people can disagree on another level with the same legitimate uncertainty. If the Bible is clear about a matter, it’s not open for debate within orthodox circles. It’s clear heresy. Today orthodox Christians have the sensibility that no one is going to be killed for being a heretic. That unfortunate historical approach in itself should be considered heretical. However, it is academically and pastorally necessary to point out mistaken beliefs among people who profess to be Christians. That includes pointing out the error in this kind of an argument.

When Being Wrong is Okay (For the Time Being)

One thing that is often pointed out by non-Christians is how Christians have so many different interpretations of the Bible. First of all, such observations usually lack the recognition that we agree on so much. Second of all, such observations fail to take into account that Christians typically recognize that understanding comes over a period of time for Christians.

The law of noncontradiction is true. That is, something is not what it is not. Regarding beliefs, some people forget this simple law of logic and want to claim that truth values are relative to individuals. The reason is because they want to believe what they want to believe without being scrutinized for it based on some larger discoverable objective truth. But the law of noncontradiction indicates that where we have more than one person who believes mutually exclusive things, only one of them can be right (and possibly none of them are).

The only conclusion is that most of us wrong about something, and are certainly ignorant about many things. The Bible takes this into consideration. There are certain core things we need to get right and we have the testimony of God’s revelation as well as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to guide us. Because of the guilt of our sin, we cannot bear to understand the truth fully. Knowing this, the Holy Spirit of God guides us gently, revealing things as we are able to handle them.

This is why Paul tells us not to violate the conscience of people who believe that we should not eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8). Who is right? Should people be allowed to eat meat sacrificed to idols or should they abstain? Read the passage. I won’t go into it here. But I will make these observations:

1. People abstained from eating meat sacrificed to idols because they worshipped those idols before they understood the truth of Christ and partaking of that meat was a burden to their consciences. However, not everyone had that problem. So, we are allowed to be wrong in ways that benefit us.
2. However, we are still wrong. God doesn’t want to leave us there. He wants us to grow in our understanding. That means putting of childish things as Paul also tells the Corinthians in chapter 13. So this cannot be used as an excuse to believe whatsoever anyone wants.
3. Therefore, we need to be humble to the fact that we need to improve our understanding. We cannot have pride in the belief that we have it all figured out or to deny that there is any understanding that is greater than what we currently understand. If a donkey can inform Balaam, then God can use anyone to enlighten us.

Economic Perspectives – Abortion, Retirement and Understanding God

This is long, but bear with me.

I’ve been thinking about the economic impact of abortion for some time now, especially having been told a couple of decades ago that we may have problems when the baby boomers retire. How do those two things relate?

You can find plenty of articles on baby boomers retiring and how it will affect the economy without understanding how that works. But the articles are there. You can also search for articles on abortion and find information on how having less workers has affected the economy. I can’t find too many articles that put the two together in any significant way. But it brings up an issue regarding our ability to balance disparate accounting methods.

This reminds me of an old brain teaser I grew up with:

“3 guys go to rent a hotel room, the room is $30, so they each pay $10. Later that night the hotel guy finds out the room is only $25 so he gives $5 to the bell boy to split between the 3 guys. The bellboy did not know how to split $5 in 3 ways so he kept $2 for himself and gave $1 to each guy so the guys only paid $9 a piece right? So if the guys paid $27 and the bellboy kept $2, where is the other dollar?”

Figure out the discrepancy and you might be able to understand where the money in the economy went.

So let me start out with one observation that is fairly easily calculable: If the children that have been aborted in the US (about 30% of children are aborted) were employed at normal rates, our GDP would be increased by over $39 trillion. Given that, the question I have is what affect do baby boomers retiring have on the economy? It’s not apples to apples accounting to figure it out and I can’t find an estimated figure that relates to GDP loss anywhere. But I can explain what happens when someone retires.

The way we normally think of retirement is that we save a percentage of our income one way or the other. Social Security is supposed to be the government’s way of saving money. (Ha. If you believe that, you’re really in trouble.) But we’ll assume it’s basically the same thing for the sake of simplicity. So people save their money by putting it in the bank, investing it, having 401K accounts, relying on the company they worked for to hold on to it, improving our real estate, etc. We worked hard for it over our lifetime and have it stored up for ourselves. It’s ours and no one else’s. In fact, since we invested it, we’ve made some interest on it so there’s more than what we actually put into it. So when we retire we have access to it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the economy – except now the government wants more of it… and why are health care costs going through the roof?

That’s the way we look at it and it seems reasonable. It’s a zero-sum game. We expect to have what we worked for. The problem is that we didn’t work for what we need today. We worked for what the world needed then. Today’s workers are making what we need today.

Money isn’t real; goods are. Money accounts for the goods we can expect to receive. The percentage of money that we have today out of all the money in the economy entitles us to the same percentage of the amount of all goods that are produced today. So if less goods are produced or our percentage decreases as the total amount of money inflates, our money is worth that much less. If you want more goods, you need more people making the goods. More people? Those are the tens of millions that have been aborted, by the way.

Let me illustrate simply.

1 - Let’s say that we have a population of for people – two couples. There are four people producing enough to support four people. More than enough.

2 - So they reproduce. Let’s say they each have only one child. That’s four people making enough to support six people. Still more than enough.

3 - Those children grow and start working. That’s six people supporting six people. Plenty to go around.

4 – The kids get married and have one child. Six people working to support seven people. Still good.

5 – The first generation retires. Two people working to support seven people. Oops. We have trouble. That’s not enough. The working population has decreased by the amount necessary to support the whole population. If one of the two becomes pregnant to try and raise up more workers for the future, that leaves one to try and support all seven people.

Everyone suffers at this point. Didn’t the first generation make enough extra to keep them in their retirement? Goods only last so long. Houses need to be kept in repair. New food needs to be produced. New clothing needs to be fashioned. The extra goods they worked for are in need of replacement and there’s precious few to do the replacing.

That’s what we are facing today. When money is invested, it doesn’t go under a rock or a mattress and gather dust until it’s needed. It’s placed in the economy as capitol for generating growth. When it’s removed, the growth goes away and the market shrinks. But what growth can we expect if we have fewer workers.

The argument can be made at this point that plenty of people are unemployed and need work. The problem is twofold.

First, moral decline has created a generation that doesn’t want to work hard. Some want the hours so they can have the money, but many aren’t willing to put in the work to warrant the money make for working the hours. Some want extra pay and benefits beyond what is reasonable, so they unionize and extort as much as they can from the bottom line of the company. Meanwhile, they make rules that make them have to work less for it. They are less productive. There is a class of potential workers that are made unusable by the drug and crime culture. The businesses that remain viable in the US have plenty of people to hire, but few worth hiring.

Second, there is great incentive for people on unemployment to remain on unemployment. I know from experience how we try to hire someone who doesn’t want the job, but only needs to prove that he was looking for one in order to keep getting the check. The taxes that pay for him to do nothing are slowing the economy such that fewer businesses are viable. The flow of money is down enough to keep business from being able to sell what they need in order to open.

I want to take this around and use it to make an observation on how we understand God. I’ve just took a couple of very simple glances at the economy from two different perspectives. I hope you’ve followed along. It’s informative to know our little place in the grand scheme of the economy and why our income is not a zero-sum game. It can be treated as such for miniscule budgeting purposes. In fact, it’s prudent to do so. But when we plan long-term, there are things we can never be certain of. We can stockpile all kinds of proverbial grain for the future and return only to find it infested with worms. Our investment shouldn’t be only in money, but in the culture. Are we producing the kind of culture that will provide when the future comes?

Looking at our relationship with God is usually like playing the zero-sum game. We see things with God from a human perspective. Indeed, God gives us human examples to help us understand our relationship with him. Perhaps we see how people could be so saddened by Jesus’ death on the cross and use this emotional sacrifice to understand how much God loves us. But really, God’s love goes far beyond any emotion that we are familiar with.

The very words “propitiation”, “atonement”, and “penal substitution” speak of human things that help give us an idea of what God was up to in the cross. We know what a bank account is like so we can understand that Jesus paid money into our spiritual bank account. We know what punishment for wrongdoing is, so we have an understanding of Jesus being punished on our behalf. But these are physical images of a spiritual truth.

Questions we have about God of things that seem contradictory are because we expect a logical zero-sum game. The presence of sin in the world has skewed the relationship between our personal connections to God (like our personal budgets) and the overall purpose of God to glorify himself in all of creation (the GDP). I have a buddy that says that the human perspective is all we have available and that’s all he can understand. He’s an accountant, so what can do about that?

Nevertheless, we are given glimpses of God’s perspective in his revelation to us in the passages of scripture. It doesn’t take the suspension of disbelief to understand these things, or delude ourselves into believing that we understand God when we really don’t. We can understand God when we understand that it’s not a zero-sum game.

Now that’s a perfectly nebulous thing to say, but it’s accurate. The difference is in our ability to wade through the cloudiness that our sin causes in this world and view the world through the purposes of God.

For example, we tend to talk about God in personal terms: “I give testimony about what God did for me and how my life has changed. And now you need to do what I did so that you can have Jesus in your life too.” The other side of this example is a small look at what God sees in this exchange: “The Spirit has motivated me to tell you my story about the gospel because that’s something that you can relate to. The same Spirit is now working in you to move you to respond in faith.”

To many, that sounds like we’re only puppets. However, God is not functioning on the same level that we are. But when we realize that it’s God working on his level to cause what happens on our level, we realize that only a God with that kind of power can be trusted to fulfill his promise. So understanding God truly requires an ability to navigate both the physical and the spiritual. So we are given the Holy Spirit of God himself to help us.

I hope this helps you understand God a little better. This was only one example. There are so many more. I hope you devote your lives to understanding how great God is in how he works in your life to glorify himself.

Fighting for Rights and Losing the Right-Giver

Two items have been in the news lately. Neither one is surprising because the philosophical foundation for them have been in place for a number of years now.

The first item is the court case that PETA filed against Sea World arguing for the human rights for cetaceans (marine mammals like orcas, whales, dolphins, etc.). It caused a flurry of debate in the public square. Example 1. Example 2. The court ruled against PETA. You can count on similar cases being appealed. This won't die. They rarely do.

But I have to ask what we would be giving the cetaceans if we grant them human rights. Take this next news item for example:

Ethicists Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva have published a paper arguing for the ethical permissibility for After-Birth Abortion. ("After-Birth Abortion" is euphemistic for "infanticide".) So finally here is vindication for the Vietnam veterans charged with being "baby-killers". But really, this rationale was around in Nazi Germany. They went farther and classified entire ethnic groups as being sub-human, not just humans in earlier stages of developments.

So, let's go ahead and give human rights to everything because really there are no human rights according to the justification cited by Giubilini and Minerva. Just follow the justifications to their logical conclusion. Nothing need change.

But my Christian brethren should not despair. The rights codified in the Constitution of the United States are not complete or fully biblical anyway. A couple of examples are given by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians. In chapter 9, Paul cites rights that he has as a preacher of the gospel of Christ. Those rights aren't in the US Constitution, but they are in the Bible. What's interesting is that with regard to the proclamation of the gospel, while these rights are indeed right to follow, he found it even better to not follow the rights divinely accorded to him. His reward for proclaiming the gospel, found in verse 18, is to proclaim the gospel free of charge making no use of the rights he cites. The only way that makes sense is if his goal is not to obtain rights for himself but rather to proclaim the gospel.

Where our rights interfere with the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is better not pursue those rights. Now that might upset some, but here it is. Many of the difficulties we see in church life are from many individuals vying to obtain their rights over and against the proclamation of the true gospel.

I can go in so many different directions at this point, but I'll save each of those directions for other posts that I may or may not ever get to. But I'll sum up how they fit together. Among those directions are importing non-Christian forms of leadership into the Church, the effects of moralism (as distinct from legalism) on the Church, hindering the outworking of Christian love in the Church, the destruction of marriage, and anemia in the Body of Christ due to not relying on the gifts that others have been given. There are probably others as well, but that's the list I have forming as I type.

What all of these things have in common is a propensity for people to compete selfishly for their rights against the larger work of Christ in the Church. There is a sense that if we don't use it, we lose it. However, if the Bible says it, we have it. In fact, many are often so concerned for their own selves that pursuit leads to the practical loss of their rights in the Church. This is because they fail to contend not for the gospel that provides these rights, but only for their rights. They cling to the rope and neglect the mountain that the rope was supposed to be attached to falling to their spiritual deaths.

So while one hand seeks to offer rights to creatures who shouldn't have them, the other undermines the rights that are being sought. Let's not make the same mistake in the Church.

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth

Good post on Triablogue. Read it to understand the title. Very thought-provoking. The thoughts that it provoked in me:

Jim Pemberton said...
It seems to me that people generally promote discipline in those areas they consider fundamental to morality and they promote liberty otherwise.

Political conservatives hold to traditional values and leave everything else up to personal responsibility as a matter of some liberty. Rebelling against traditional values, political liberals have declared liberty in those areas while developing a different set of moral strictures otherwise.

Both general schools of moral thought are arbitrary when untethered from biblical revelation, even where they happen to be similar to it.