A Pepper Grinder Post

It's Alive

Like most people, I have my set of pet peeves. One of the ones at the top of the list, especially in the church context, is people who dumb down the Bible. I have seen this often in Sunday School classes (despite the fact that I and my children have not been big on Sunday School for many years), but I also see it more often than I would like in sermons targeted at adults. The thinking seems to be that the Bible is too difficult for an ordinary person to understand, so instead of simply trying to show what the Bible is saying, the preacher presents his idea about what the passage means.

I HATE this! Instead of hearing and understanding the Word of God, we are presented with the wisdom of a person. The person might be insightful. He might be a great scholar. He might be someone who is open to God and is accurately presenting what God spoke to him through a passage. The problem with this approach, even if we are hearing an excellent presentation of what God said to one person through a passage, is that the Holy Spirit might choose to say something different to a different person through the same set of verses.

I expect that anyone who has read the Bible more than a little has had the experience of reading a passage and being struck by something completely different than what struck him when he read the same verses before. This stood out most clearly to me when I looked at the Bible I had read when I first became a Christian. At that time, I was a firm believer in reading the Bible with a highlighter in hand. As I looked at this Bible decades later, I could see by what I had and had not highlighted that things which leaped off the page for me then were not necessarily things that grabbed me much now. Conversely, verses that now meant a tremendous amount to me were often just plain white on the page.

I have also found that as I learned to study passages more in depth, many Bible passages seem like an onion. The deeper I go, the more I find. This is part of what makes me believe that the Bible truly is inspired by God. It is like a mine that yields more riches the deeper one digs. It also seems like a living, breathing document, which can comfort me one day with the same words it used to convict me the day before.

It's alive! It's powerful! Yet so often we treat it like some ancient text that must have its meaning spelled out if the average person is to have any hope of understanding it.

I can imagine someone saying, "Hold on there, Pepper. Many of your blog postings are explanations of Bible passages. If what you are saying is true, why don't you just post selections from the Bible?"

Good question. I believe there are two ways to study a passage and teach about it. One is exegesis (ex being the Greek preposition meaning "out of"), which strives to dig into a passage and draw out what is there. The other is eisegesis (eis meaning "into"), where someone comes to a passage with a preconceived idea of what it means and looks for tidbits that buttress his understanding. I would argue that when doing exegesis, one should expect surprises, just as one would when talking to a highly intelligent and unconventional person. The person doing eisegesis is simply looking for confirmation for what he already knows. I may not always succeed, but my goal in posts that are centered on a Bible passage is simply to open what is there, not to force it into some idea I have. In fact, there have been many times that I have had to scrap or modify a message I planned to present because, as I dug into a passage, I discovered it didn't actually say what I thought it said at first.

Is the Bible sometimes baffling? For sure. Do some passages sound like they set an impossibly high standard? Absolutely. Is it sometimes offensive? Yes. But if we take out our Bible teacher sandpaper and carefully smooth out all the rough edges, what we end up with is not the Bible that God inspired, but our idea of what God should have written.

A professor I had in seminary whom I really liked told us once that when he gave a sermon, he liked to read the Bible passage at the beginning and the end of his sermons. That way, he told us, no matter how much he messed things up, at least the congregation would have heard it twice the way God said it. This professor wasn't just giving lip service to the idea that the Bible is a living document inspired by God, he was actually acting as if it were true.

If you are someone who teaches the Bible, do you try to simplify it? Do you try to downplay difficult passages and emphasize things you know will resonate with your audience? If so, I would maintain you are not treating it as if it were the words of God.

When studying the Bible, does a passage sometimes twist away from the direction you thought it was going? Does a passage you were hoping to use as a weapon sometimes twist around and cut you instead? Does the Bible sometimes surprise or astonish you? Does it sometimes leave you scratching your head? I would say that these are all signs that you are allowing the Bible to be what it truly is: the words of God.

I'm not saying we shouldn't help people understand the Bible. However, we should never approach the Bible with the smug feeling that we have it figured out. Our goal should be to clarify what the Bible truly says, even if those words are confusing or offensive to some. Let the Bible be the Bible, and let the chips fall where they may.

As an illustration of this, I'm planning to have my next post be focused on the passage I was going to base this post on. The passage is relevant to what I said here, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I was manhandling it to get it to say what I wanted to say. Instead, I'm going to try to look at the verses I was planning to include in this article and let them speak for themselves.

The Bible is alive. Let's act like it.

- Pepper
Posted 2019-02-16

*Image credits: Old books from RGB Stock