Maybe it is the influence of my Fundamentalist, “Give me that Old-Time Religion” upbringing but I sometimes think about the role of the Bible in our lives. Should the Bible (in it’s complete entirety) dictate the way we live or should our current society (including attitudes, social norms, etc.) allow us to label parts of the Bible as irrelevant and thus redefine how we interpret the Bible. In other words: Should we change religion or should religion change us?
And I started thinking about this anew after finding this link on Reiter’s Block to a post on Faith and Theology titled Twelve propositions on same-sex relationships and the church. In this post is the following statement on hermeneutics, the science of interpretation:
For here is a fundamental hermeneutical axiom: “If Biblical texts on any social or moral topic are to be understood as God’s word for us today, two conditions at least must be satisfied. There must be a resemblance between the ancient and modern social situation or institution or practice or attitude sufficient for us to be able to say that in some sense the text is talking about the same thing that we recognise today. And we must be able to demonstrate an underlying principle at work in the text which is consonant with biblical faith taken as a whole, and not contradicted by any subsequent experience or understanding” (Walter Houston).
Now, I know nothing about Walter Houston except that it appears he is an Oxford man whose research interests are “the social-scientific interprtation of the Hebrew Bible, with regard to the topics of social class, economics, and culture; its ethics, especially social ethics; and its hermeneutics.” And this is the first thing that really, really bothers me. This guy is doing university-level research on how to interpret the Bible. And he’s bringing into his research more research on ancient social situations, institutions, attitudes, etc. How the heck am I supposed to have devotions now? How am I supposed to apply anything at all to my life until I get a Ph.D. in ancient studies so that I can figure out what I should apply and what I shouldn’t? Are we really at the mercy of the “scholars” to tell us what is relevant for our lives?
And what does this say about the Bible? Is it really any different than Grimms Fairy Tales which get reinvented every few years; updated for today’s youth? I think you’d be suprised to know how some of the original ones ended — not at all the way Walt tells them. There are people who claim that the Bible is absolute truth. Yet absolute truth should be true, absolutely, no? How can absolute truth change from generation to generation? And doesn’t this make the Bible less like God’s Word and more like Dear Abby? A lot of advice that you can pick and choose from and use or not use depending on your mood — I mean your modern social situation?
And what does this say about God? I was taught that the Bible is the plenary, verbally, infallible, inspired, inerrant Word of God. If this is the case, then it seems to me that we ought not be mucking around with it. After all, “God said it, I believe it, and that’s good enough for me” was a whole-heartedly believed motto in my youth. But now, it’s “God said it, but I’ve decided it’s not applicable to my particular situation, and that’s good enough for me.” I wonder why God put all that stuff in the Bible in the first place, knowing that it would be out of date in just a few millenia. I thought he was omniscient — surely he would have had enough foresight to put some everlasting words in there.
Furthermore, doesn’t this really make Society our new God? Since we are reinterpreting the Bible based on our “social situation or institution or practice or attitude,” if society changes then our Bible changes. I thought it was supposed to be the other way around. I thought the Bible was to dictate how we live. But it seems that the modern view is that the way we live dictates how we read the Bible. So society is, essentially, issuing a new edition every few years. You know, updated and revised with more graphs and pictures and 17 hours of special features including a 7 hour “The Making of” featurette. If Society is putting out the new editions, doesn’t this make Society God?
And what is the end result of all this reinterpretation? I doubt very much that passages deemed irrelevant will ever come back into “fashion” so we will slowly eliminate verse after verse, passage after passage, until entire books are inapplicable to our modern social situation. What do you think will remain in 25, 50, or 100 years? I think that pretty much the entire Old Testament is null and void even now. After all, the entire thing is about a nomadic, oppressed by everyone and his cousin, desert-wandering society. That pretty much fails the first of Houston’s two tests so chuck it all! And even a lot of the New Testament is out. I mean, women covering their heads while praying, all men with short hair, divorcees banned from church boards, men only as pastors, deploring homosexuality — we have absolutely nothing in common with those people.
I think the death blow is not far away and will be signaled by the removal of Bibles from those little shelves on the back of the pews. Afterall, if the pastor can’t even mention one verse during her sermon, why do we need them? And the pastor can’t mention a single verse because she needs to be hip and relevant and nothing in there is. Of course, we can always ship our unused copies to third world countries. It will take a couple more generations for their social situations to outgrow the Bible.
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