#scriptural interpretation

[buggie-hagen]

Luther rated the various books, placing the gospel of John, Romans, Galatians, and 1 Peter at the head of the list. Also, by moving books around, he placed Hebrews, Jude, James, and Revelation in a lower category of authority. Once again, this arose out of his humanist predilections, which allowed him to ask questions of authorship and style of individual books in addition to providing summaries of particular writings. ~Timothy J. Wengert, "Martin Luther's Great Surprise" in Lutheran Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, Summer 2023, 177.

[buggie-hagen]

Nowhere can the Spirit be found more present and more active than in the very holy letters which he wrote.

~Martin Luther

[a-certain-life]

Reflection on 1 Corinthians 10:27-30

 If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience. But if someone says to you, ‘This has been offered in sacrifice’, then do not eat it, out of consideration for the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience—I mean the other’s conscience, not your own. For why should my liberty be subject to the judgement of someone else’s conscience? If I partake with thankfulness, why should I be denounced because of that for which I give thanks?

In preface to this, Paul says in 10:23, "'Everything is lawful,' but not everything is beneficial." In this context, we can conclude, along with Paul, that it is not unlawful in a religious sense for Christians to eat meat that was part of or underwent a pagan ritual. However, it is not beneficial for a Christian to knowingly partake in it. But it is beneficial to maintain a willful ignorance by not raising questions in the market or of one's host about the meat, as it might be seen as offensive that you would then not eat the meat or that you are being confrontational. But if the host (or, presumably also the merchant) were to volunteer the information, a Christian probably should not partake, not because it is unlawful for him/her to consume it, but because it is not beneficial to the merchant or the host for the Christian to pretend they approve of either their paganism or their tacit support of it.

Alternately, one could interpret this in a completely different manner, that one should not ask, and in the event that the information is volunteered, the Christian can and should still accept the hospitality, not because you agree with their practices, but because it's the polite thing to do.

I don't necessarily see these two interpretations as mutually exclusive, as Paul says, "For why should my freedom be determined by someone else's conscience?" The pagan offering origin has nothing to do with the Christian's thankfulness to God for the food, and whether s/he knows about it or not, eating it does not imply tacit agreement with paganism. At the same time, the Christian is also permitted to refuse in this case, if his/her conscience is bothered with the knowledge.

It's a tricky passage, but I think the broader implications of this are what is most interesting.There seems to be a subtle exhortation here not to impose your beliefs upon others while at the same time recognizing that it is possible to do this while also serving your own conscience, whether that means not doing or partaking of something you disagree with, or going with the flow, but on your own terms. 

To put this in context of modern questions of things accepted by society that may bother the conscience of some Christians, we can look at the growing trend of cases in which a person or group of people claim that a positive right to something (such as birth control) they disagree with violates their religious liberty. By Paul's logic, this is not possible. What is acceptable to one person's or even the whole of society's conscience has no bearing on your own personal freedom to choose what is best for your according to your own beliefs. But just as their conscience cannot abridge your freedom of conscience, neither can your conscience abridge theirs. It should be your example of living your values that persuades them to your way of thinking, not singular (self-)righteous displays.

To the same end, the manner in which some Christians largely separate themselves from and reject things that are "worldly" or "secular" that are, on the whole, inherently neutral or even good (such as alcohol, dancing, popular media, or public schooling), merely because they overtly lack a Christian origin is perhaps a direct modern analog to the pagan ritual meat of Corinth. There's largely no point to it unless you feel like it's either harming your relationship with God or your consumption of it is providing a bad example to someone and keeping them from God.

This is a lot to unpack from just these four verses (and bits of their surrounding context). And I could be completely off-base. But this section really did strike me as relevant to modern-day issues where it really seems that many Christians are doing the exact opposite of what Paul advised the Christians of Corinth to do in their interactions with their non-Christian neighbors.

[a-certain-life]

8 Things Your Pastor Will Never Tell You About the Bible

This is a guest post written by Richard Hagenston. Hagenston is an ordained United Methodist minister, a former pastor, and the author of Fabricating Faith: How Christianity Became a Religion Jesus Would Have Rejected.

When I was a United Methodist pastor, I learned an unsettling thing from my own experiences and those of some colleagues serving other churches: Many ministers keep secrets about the Bible, lest things they learned in seminary (or otherwise know) hurt church attendance and the Sunday offering.

This put some friends of mine in a terrible quandary, forced to say things from the pulpit that were doctrinally demanded but which they had come to privately question. As for me, I resolved the matter by leaving the pastorate. When I did, I got calls of congratulations from two nearby ministers. One of those calls was especially poignant. He said I was fortunate to have other skills from my previous work experience that I could draw on. But he added that all he had been trained to do was to be a minister and that he felt trapped in the pulpit saying things he no longer believed in order to continue supporting his family.

It’s time our secrets about the Bible came out. It’s time for Christians to know what their pastors won’t tell them.

Interesting read. Some of this, even candid conversations with theological scholars and a fair amount of my own reading, I've never heard before. Though at least some of it (virgin birth, pseudographic epistles, and Jesus' remarks on his divinity in the gnostic gospels) I am familiar with.

[christianresearchinstitute]

Q&A: Slavery, God’s Foreknowledge, and Ouija Boards

Q&A: Slavery, God’s Foreknowledge, and Ouija Boards

On today’s Bible Answer Man broadcast Hank answers questions on the following topics:

Does the meaning of the Bible evolve depending on your circumstances?

How do I witness to an atheist who claims the Bible condones slavery?

What are your thoughts on the book Paul and Jesus by James Tabor?

How do we know the God of the Bible is the true God? Since God knows who will believe and who will end up…

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[a-certain-life]

The Message Bible, divine inspiration, and my own heresies about the Bible

While it definitely isn't a study bible, the Message Bible is EXCELLENT for reading. I've been listening to the audio book version lately while I draw, and the modern language interpretation really makes the stories pop when read aloud. However, it also makes it really evident that God could have done with better editors. (For context, I've worked on and off as an editor of some nature for almost the last 15 years.)

That said, I don't necessarily believe that all of the Bible is actually divinely inspired. Much of the Old Testament reads too much like a written-down oral history and accounting of a people, and such a large portion of the New Testament is a collection of haphazardly preserved correspondences that, if one is really honest about the history and provenance of the documents, complete divine inspiration just isn't logical. But that doesn't mean I don't think there's wisdom in the text and that God had absolutely no hand in it. Far from it. I'm just saying that too many hands of men (and maybe women, but mostly men) have been involved in the formation of what we now consider scripture for me to regard the contents of the Bible as more than "a good start" when in comes to guidelines for living.

But back to my initial remark about God needing a better editor. The religious community would completely destroy me if I worked up a reading Bible that did away with all of the repetitions, wouldn't they? And yet, think how many more people might read the Bible and gain wisdom from it if you pared down some of the repetitiousness, excised all of the genealogy and census records (possibly organizing them in an appendix), and merely presented the stories in readable, contemporary language. That's where we gain most of our wisdom, anyway. When we read, or even study, scripture in school (excepting perhaps seminary and theological studies), bible study, or church, how often do we look at the litany of sacrifice laws in the Pentateuch or the genealogies and censuses that are interspersed throughout? Historically, sure, they have some importance, but for the masses who aren't historians (biblical or otherwise)? This is why (I think) more people haven't actually read the Bible beyond what they have to in church and Sunday School.

Anyway...that's enough heresy from me for now. Feel free to discuss.

[a-certain-life]

Scripture reflection: How good works and questioning our perceptions brings us into the light

I'm sure many of you know that feeling...either sitting in church listening to the Word or reading it yourself at home (or in my own typical case, reading along with a podcast)...and as you begin to understand the message, a smile creeps over your face, or a peace settles in your heart, because it speaks directly to a journey, a mission, a question, or a worry. (Of course, sometimes, it'll do the opposite and make you feel accused and sick, because it's gotten to the heart of a matter you've been hiding from. That's actually good, too, but today is not one of those days.) As I've been meditating a lot on the progressive teachings in the Bible, and of Jesus in particular, this set of readings really settles in well with that and has presented me with this lovely opportunity to reflect with you today.

Today's readings came from 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Ephesians 5:8-14, and John 9:1-41.

There are two primary themes among all of these readings: the dichotomy between both symbolic and literal light and darkness, and the idea that one sees best sometimes not with their eyes, but with their heart. Both of these themes show up in literature a lot, not just in the Bible, though regardless of where you find them, the lessons they teach are the same.

The light and darkness one is an easy one to work out, for the most part--light is good; dark is bad. But there is a little more to it than that, especially in today's reading. There's the idea presented that one shouldn't do things in darkness, because people might think you're up to something. This doesn't literally mean, "don't work at night," but rather it's a symbolic device used to illustrate that you shouldn't do anything in private that you'd be ashamed of if people found out. The passage in Ephesians is a little more direct about this than is the story in John, but Paul still waxes a little poetic about it and even suggests that doing good deeds "in the light" shines a light on the darkness (not necessarily your own, but often that of the society you're in) to expose something bad, and that the good deeds can even make the bad things into light. We can see many examples of this principle in works of charity, mercy, and justice, as people do good works that expose the darkness of poverty, cruelty, and injustice and spur others onward to rectify them.

This, then, fits in nicely with the other theme of seeing better with your heart (or soul) than with your eyes. Or, to take the corollary, what is in one's heart is more important than outward appearance. This is illustrated as Samuel regards Jesse's seven sons and thinks, "surely, one of these strong, handsome men is God's anointed," but God says to Samuel, "Not so fast; while you only see what looks good on the outside, I see what looks good on the inside, and none of these men is the one I'm looking for." And as it turned out, the one God was looking for was David, Jesse's youngest son, whom his own father did not judge as important enough to come to the sacrifice.

This scene is echoed in the reading in John in a slightly more symbolic way. There's a lot of perceiving going on in this story--people perceive the blind man as being punished for sin, either his own or his parents'. Then, after the blind man is healed, we learn that many people had defined him by his disability, and when he came to them able to see, many did not think he was the same man as they had seen begging before. When the Pharisees asked the man how he was able to see, they perceived the act of healing as not coming from God, because Jesus performed it on the Sabbath. When the Jews came to the man's parents asking what they believed about what happened, they merely said to ask their son, because they didn't want to be perceived as believing that Jesus was the Christ. And finally, when the man was asked a second time about how he came to be healed, his response lends clarity to the whole meaning of the story, using the literary device of the blind man who sees things more clearly than those with sight, because he sees with the heart rather than his eyes. And like in Samuel, everyone in this story perceives only through the eyes of men, which are limited in their capacity to see what is truly important.

As we unravel the somewhat cryptic moral, as spoken by Jesus, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind....If you were blind, you would have no sin; but since you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains," we find a reiteration in terms of what the story in Samuel illustrates as well as that classic reversal of wisdom that is common in Jesus' teachings--that those who "see," that is, they only see through the common sight of man, remain sinners, because they do not know how look deeper than just the appearance of things and are thus blind to them. But those who have been blind (either literally or figuratively) know how to see more than just what is in front of their eyes, and therefore can get to the truth of the matter more readily--in this case, the truth about the kingdom of God. 

Putting it all together, being able to perceive truth and "see" with more than just your eyes is one of the things that shines light on the darkness, whether it's your own or that of the society in which you live, and is the first step toward working "in the light" to expose and overcome that darkness.

[thirstygargoyle]

What harm is it to me, I ask again, if I think the writer had one meaning, someone else thinks he had another? All of us who read are trying to see and to grasp the meaning of the man we are reading: and given that we believe him a speaker of the truth, we should obviously not think that he was saying something that we know or think to be false. While therefore each one of us is trying to understand in the sacred writings what the writer meant by them, what harm if one accepts a meaning which You, Light of all true minds, show him to be in itself a true meaning, even if the author we are reading did not actually mean that by it: since his meaning also, though different from mine, is true.

St Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed, 12.18, 246.