Extracting the Power of the Word

It's my second time taking Biblical Interpretation class under the same teacher haha.. Don't think many people have had that experience! Nevertheless, I felt that I have learnt so much during these 33 hours of class squashed into one and a half weeks.. (few more hours more to go!)

The first thing that I caught was the danger of reading the word with the tinted lenses of our presuppositions. (Billings, J. Todd, The Word of God for the People of God) It is dangerous because we will unwittingly inject our own preconceived notions into the text, and derive meanings that neither can be found from the text nor what the author or God intended it to be. For the majority of Christians, however, this practice is not nearly as fatal, since most of us derive our theological understandings not from the bible, due to how little we read it.. sadly. Instead, we come to understand who God is from basically living life, like how our parents talked about God when we were young, how we interpret our own life experiences and those around us, how the pastor in our church portrays God to be. And thus, if we are surrounded by a community of believers who are strong in their bible, we'll be able to derive a theological understanding that is accurate too? Unfortunately, the community who is strong in their word does not come from nowhere. Since the majority of believers are not strong in their word, there is not only a need to change how the community views the word of God, but also a need to educate Christians on how they can study the word so that they can extract its life transforming power, and it starts with us. Before that happens, the church will be in danger of being a community that guides each other with our subjective ideas of who God is.
A corollary of Christians deriving their theological understandings from experience and the community rather than the word of God directly is the foundation of their faith becomes easily shaken. When we do not know where in scripture we can find the promises of God that we cling on to, letting go of them becomes easy when we begin to doubt if God ever said them. Falsely interpreting passages as promises of God has an even heftier repercussion, as we live life we a false sense of who God is, and we question if God is as faithful as He claims to be as we do not see the fulfilment of promises He never gave.  

Reading the word with our preconceived notions is also dangerous because we inevitably limit its meaning and it disallows us from experiencing the fullness of its message. This, I feel could be a reason why people do not see the need the need to read the scripture. It either agrees with their pre-conceived notions, thus does not adding much value to them, or the meaning seems so obscure that they decide to skip over it altogether, since something so mysterious or abstract probably would not have much real life applications. Consequently reading the word becomes a religious duty for Christians and the word loses its power to transform lives.

The skills of interpretation are definitely not natural. In my natural state, I tend not to rely on commentaries, partly because I believe that I should be able to figure out everything that God wants to speak from the text alone, partly because I like the process of figuring out stuff for myself, and partly also because I’ve never believed that commentaries are necessarily right. Naturally, I would want to know the context of where a text came from, for the surrounding passages would definitely change the way we understand the text in question. However, often I forget that there is a historical context that may or may not be found in the text, e.g. who the author is, who he is writing to, the reason for writing the letter, the specific happenings at the time of writing, and any relevant geographical, historical, political, customs, ideological information that would change the way we understand the culture of the original intended audience. Often, I get to impatient in wanting to know what the text says, that I forget that I do not have enough information to do so and jump straight into the text.

But at the same time, I have also realized that the stated purpose of why a book was written in a commentary may not always be correct. Our understanding of the details in the book may sometimes shape the way we understand the overall message of the book. And of course, our understanding of the overall message will affect our understanding of the details in the text. This is something called the hermeneutical spiral! It’s the process of slowly coming closer to the intended meaning of the text. (Tate, W. Randolph, Biblical Interpretation: An Integrated Approach, page 36) Glad there is name for the phenomenon I’ve been experiencing all along.

One aspect of biblical interpretation, which is probably the most fundamental, is that we need to be aware of our own pre-understandings, to not see the text with our tinted lenses of theology, but rather let the text speak for itself. Easier said than done, but I have experienced how fulfilling reading the bible can be, especially narratives, when I do so. Try reading the Noah’s Ark flood without assuming that God is good, but instead see how the story itself shows that God is gracious through the flood; or not assuming that Abraham is a righteous person, and see how the text shows that God is again the one who is faithful in the life of Abraham. At first it may seem as though you are taking one step back in knowing God, but in letting the text speak for itself, we see that God is who He says he is. Reading Robert Altar's famous book titled The Art of Biblical Narrative, I am reminded that the author is telling us a message through the narrative, and not merely giving a recount of historical events. If we merely focus on the details, we may miss the message the author is trying to convey. But yet the details in the text, such as the art of repetition, and the art of using dialogue, cannot be missed either as they add to the overall message of the book.

The most important aspect of biblical interpretation is of course the application of the eternal principles that we gather from reading the text. For this, it seems that there is no technique to derive deep and meaningful application points other than spending time reflecting deeply and widely about the issues of life. Perhaps this is where the Holy Spirit comes in as our counsellor to guide us into all truth, and the wisdom from God comes to help us apply His truth into our lives. But we too have a part to play. How much of our lives are we willing to let the word of God question?

But prove 
     yourselves doers of the word, 
     and 
     not merely hearers 
          who delude themselves.  
For 
          if anyone is a hearer of the word 
          and 
          not a doer, 
     he is like a man 
          who looks at his natural face in a mirror;
for  
     once he has looked at himself 
     and 
     gone away,
     he has immediately forgotten
          what kind of person he was.  
But 
one who looks intently at the perfect law, 
     the law of liberty
and 
abides by it, 
     not having become a forgetful hearer 
     but
     an effectual doer, 
this man will be blessed in what he does.

(James 1:22-25, NASB)