This is the "wrap-up" of Chapter 5 of what (I hope) Sean is reading at this particular time. I thought it might prove at least entertaining, if not informative to us here.
Why is it that people so often find things in Bible narratives that are not really there — read into the Bible their own notions rather than read out of the Bible what God wants them to know? There are three main reasons.
First, they are desperate — desperate for information that will help them, that will be of personal value, that will apply to their own situation.
Second, they are impatient; they want their answers now, from this book, from this chapter.
Third, they wrongly expect that everything in the Bible applies directly as instruction for their own individual lives.
The Bible is a great resource. It contains all that a Christian really needs in terms of guidance from God for living. But it does not always contain answers as specific and personal as some people would wish, and it does not contain all its information in every chapter of every book! Too impatient to find God’s will from the Bible as a whole, people make mistakes — they allow themselves to misinterpret individual parts of the Scriptures.
So that you might avoid this tendency, we list here eight of the most common errors of interpretation that people commit in looking for answers from parts of the Bible. While all of these apply to narratives, they are not limited to them.
1. Allegorizing. Instead of concentrating on the clear meaning, people relegate the text to merely reflecting another meaning beyond the text. There are allegorical portions of Scripture (e.g., Ezekiel 23 or parts of Revelation) but none of the scriptural allegories is simple narrative.
2. Decontextualizing. Ignoring the full historical and literary contexts, and often the individual narrative, people concentrate on small units only and thus miss interpretational clues. If you decontextualize enough, you can make almost any part of Scripture say anything you want it to.
3. Selectivity. This is analogous to decontextualizing. It involves picking and choosing specific words and phrases to concentrate on, ignoring the others, and ignoring the overall sweep of the passage being studied. Instead of balancing the parts and the whole, it ignores some of the parts and the whole entirely.
4. False combination. This approach combines elements from here and there in a passage and makes a point out of their combination, even though the elements themselves are not directly connected in the passage itself. An extreme example of this all too common interpretational error would be the conclusion that one’s real enemies are in the church rather than outside the church because in Psalm 23 David says that he will dwell in God’s house forever and that God has prepared him a table in the presence of his enemies. (The enemies must therefore be in God’s house along with David, or else he could not be in their presence.)
5. Redefinition. When the plain meaning of the text leaves people cold, producing no immediate spiritual delight or saying something they do not want to hear, they are often tempted to redefine it to mean something else. For example, they take Jesus’ words, “Woe to you who are rich...” and “Woe to you when all people speak well of you...” (Luke 6:24, 26) and redefine them from their plain meaning to “Woe to you who love money so much you have renounced your faith in God” and “Woe to you who have become atheists in order to have cheap praise from worldly infidels.” That is, these sayings are redefined in such a way that they are narrow enough no longer to be a threat to the people doing the redefinition.
6. Extracanonical authority. By using some sort of special external key to the Scriptures, usually a set of doctrines or a book that claims to reveal scriptural truths not otherwise knowable, people suppose that they can unlock the mysteries of the Bible. Cults usually operate on the basis of an extracanonical authority, treating the Bible somewhat like a series of riddles needing a special knowledge to solve.
7. Moralizing. This is the assumption that principles for living can be derived from all passages. The moralizing reader in effect asks the question, “What is the moral of this story?” at the end of every individual narrative. An example would be, “What can we learn about handling adversity from how the Israelites endured their years as slaves in Egypt?” The fallacy of this approach is that it ignores the fact that the narratives were written to show the progress of God’s history of redemption, not to illustrate principles. They are historical narratives, not illustrative narratives.
8. Personalizing. Also known as individualizing, this is reading Scripture in a way that supposes that any or all parts apply to you or your group in a way that they do not apply to everyone else. People tend to be self-centered, even when reading the Bible. When the big picture of God’s redemptive history fails to satisfy, they may fall prey to the temptation to look for something that will satisfy their personal needs, cravings, or problems. They can forget that all parts of the Bible are intended for everyone, not just them. Examples of personalizing would be, “The story of Balaam’s talking donkey reminds me that I talk too much.” Or, “The story of the building of the temple is God’s way of telling us that we have to construct a new church building.”
Perhaps the single most useful bit of caution we can give you about reading and learning from narratives is this: Do not be a monkey-see-monkey-do reader of the Bible. No Bible narrative was written specifically about you. The Joseph narrative is about Joseph, specifically how God did things through him — it is not a narrative directly about you. The Ruth narrative glorifies God’s protection and benefit for Ruth and the Bethlehemites — not you. You can always learn a great deal from these narratives, and from all the Bible’s narratives, but you can never assume that God expects you to do exactly the same thing that Bible characters did, or to have the same things happen to you that happened to them. For further discussion on this point, see chapter 6.
Bible characters are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes wise, and sometimes foolish. They are sometimes punished, sometimes shown mercy, sometimes well off, and sometimes miserable.
Your task is to learn God’s word from the narratives about them, not to try to do everything that was done in the Bible. Just because someone in a Bible story did something, that does not mean that you have either permission or obligation to do it too.
What you can and should do is to obey what God actually calls you to do in the Scripture. Narratives are precious to us because they so vividly demonstrate God’s involvement in the world and illustrate his principles and calling. They thus teach us a lot — but what they directly teach us does not systematically include personal ethics. For that area of life, we must turn elsewhere in the Scriptures, to the various places where personal ethics are actually taught categorically and explicitly. The richness and variety of the Scriptures must be understood as our ally — a welcome resource, never a complicated burden.
Why is it that people so often find things in Bible narratives that are not really there — read into the Bible their own notions rather than read out of the Bible what God wants them to know? There are three main reasons.
First, they are desperate — desperate for information that will help them, that will be of personal value, that will apply to their own situation.
Second, they are impatient; they want their answers now, from this book, from this chapter.
Third, they wrongly expect that everything in the Bible applies directly as instruction for their own individual lives.
The Bible is a great resource. It contains all that a Christian really needs in terms of guidance from God for living. But it does not always contain answers as specific and personal as some people would wish, and it does not contain all its information in every chapter of every book! Too impatient to find God’s will from the Bible as a whole, people make mistakes — they allow themselves to misinterpret individual parts of the Scriptures.
So that you might avoid this tendency, we list here eight of the most common errors of interpretation that people commit in looking for answers from parts of the Bible. While all of these apply to narratives, they are not limited to them.
1. Allegorizing. Instead of concentrating on the clear meaning, people relegate the text to merely reflecting another meaning beyond the text. There are allegorical portions of Scripture (e.g., Ezekiel 23 or parts of Revelation) but none of the scriptural allegories is simple narrative.
2. Decontextualizing. Ignoring the full historical and literary contexts, and often the individual narrative, people concentrate on small units only and thus miss interpretational clues. If you decontextualize enough, you can make almost any part of Scripture say anything you want it to.
3. Selectivity. This is analogous to decontextualizing. It involves picking and choosing specific words and phrases to concentrate on, ignoring the others, and ignoring the overall sweep of the passage being studied. Instead of balancing the parts and the whole, it ignores some of the parts and the whole entirely.
4. False combination. This approach combines elements from here and there in a passage and makes a point out of their combination, even though the elements themselves are not directly connected in the passage itself. An extreme example of this all too common interpretational error would be the conclusion that one’s real enemies are in the church rather than outside the church because in Psalm 23 David says that he will dwell in God’s house forever and that God has prepared him a table in the presence of his enemies. (The enemies must therefore be in God’s house along with David, or else he could not be in their presence.)
5. Redefinition. When the plain meaning of the text leaves people cold, producing no immediate spiritual delight or saying something they do not want to hear, they are often tempted to redefine it to mean something else. For example, they take Jesus’ words, “Woe to you who are rich...” and “Woe to you when all people speak well of you...” (Luke 6:24, 26) and redefine them from their plain meaning to “Woe to you who love money so much you have renounced your faith in God” and “Woe to you who have become atheists in order to have cheap praise from worldly infidels.” That is, these sayings are redefined in such a way that they are narrow enough no longer to be a threat to the people doing the redefinition.
6. Extracanonical authority. By using some sort of special external key to the Scriptures, usually a set of doctrines or a book that claims to reveal scriptural truths not otherwise knowable, people suppose that they can unlock the mysteries of the Bible. Cults usually operate on the basis of an extracanonical authority, treating the Bible somewhat like a series of riddles needing a special knowledge to solve.
7. Moralizing. This is the assumption that principles for living can be derived from all passages. The moralizing reader in effect asks the question, “What is the moral of this story?” at the end of every individual narrative. An example would be, “What can we learn about handling adversity from how the Israelites endured their years as slaves in Egypt?” The fallacy of this approach is that it ignores the fact that the narratives were written to show the progress of God’s history of redemption, not to illustrate principles. They are historical narratives, not illustrative narratives.
8. Personalizing. Also known as individualizing, this is reading Scripture in a way that supposes that any or all parts apply to you or your group in a way that they do not apply to everyone else. People tend to be self-centered, even when reading the Bible. When the big picture of God’s redemptive history fails to satisfy, they may fall prey to the temptation to look for something that will satisfy their personal needs, cravings, or problems. They can forget that all parts of the Bible are intended for everyone, not just them. Examples of personalizing would be, “The story of Balaam’s talking donkey reminds me that I talk too much.” Or, “The story of the building of the temple is God’s way of telling us that we have to construct a new church building.”
Perhaps the single most useful bit of caution we can give you about reading and learning from narratives is this: Do not be a monkey-see-monkey-do reader of the Bible. No Bible narrative was written specifically about you. The Joseph narrative is about Joseph, specifically how God did things through him — it is not a narrative directly about you. The Ruth narrative glorifies God’s protection and benefit for Ruth and the Bethlehemites — not you. You can always learn a great deal from these narratives, and from all the Bible’s narratives, but you can never assume that God expects you to do exactly the same thing that Bible characters did, or to have the same things happen to you that happened to them. For further discussion on this point, see chapter 6.
Bible characters are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes wise, and sometimes foolish. They are sometimes punished, sometimes shown mercy, sometimes well off, and sometimes miserable.
Your task is to learn God’s word from the narratives about them, not to try to do everything that was done in the Bible. Just because someone in a Bible story did something, that does not mean that you have either permission or obligation to do it too.
What you can and should do is to obey what God actually calls you to do in the Scripture. Narratives are precious to us because they so vividly demonstrate God’s involvement in the world and illustrate his principles and calling. They thus teach us a lot — but what they directly teach us does not systematically include personal ethics. For that area of life, we must turn elsewhere in the Scriptures, to the various places where personal ethics are actually taught categorically and explicitly. The richness and variety of the Scriptures must be understood as our ally — a welcome resource, never a complicated burden.
