Here are some selected quotes from (and about) Dr. Bauman, in case you didn't see them on Facebook. Enjoy!
Dr. Bauman on Mama Mia "I was the port-a-potty and the crap kept coming!"
Dr. Bauman “Female actresses are really just under-nourished folks on the verge of dying because they escaped from Africa. There aren't even 'average' people on screen.”
"You hear people say 'Celebrate Diversity'- NO! Celebrate Excellence!" –Dr. Bauman
"It's good to be a mother- unless you're a guy! I shudder to think of Phil as a Mother" –Dr. Bauman
"If you're going to your death confident that you're a good guy, you’re a fool." -Dr. Bauman
"Puns are for children' "A pun what conclusion did you base that decision." –Dr. Bauman
"Music and train wrecks don't go together unless its Kanye West." –Dr. Bauman
"Maybe this implies that she live with the window…" –Dr. Bauman
"Bauman-esqe Torture..." –Dr. Bauman
"Eternity was the Christian version of Time. Eternity went out of business and Time goes on!" –Dr. Bauman
“Are you hot for werewolves or not?” –Dr. Bauman
“To be knighted is to be in the dark.” –Dr. Bauman
“Women want control and men are stupid, they’re perfect for each other.” –Dr. Bauman
"Rosie, don't we have a 'No-Drinking Policy' here?" -Dr. Bauman
"Me, Myself and I- the Trinity!" –Dr. Bauman
"It's a compliment Phil- you're hot!" -Dr. Bauman
"You're hating people? Don't look at me when you say that…" -Dr. Bauman
"Buy American! What if I'm American and I buy and damn thing I want?" - Dr. Bauman
"What car would Jesus buy? A Christ-ler?"- Dr. Bauman
"Maybe you should become a Christian and stop drinking coffee… you were made free to become an addict?" -Dr. Bauman
"Live somewhere else forever… get a nun transfer!" -Dr. Bauman
"Separating from sinners to escape sin never works- you're always with you." -Dr. Bauman
"God knows what we will freely choose." -Dr. Bauman
"God has made the world in such a way that your will matters." -Dr. Bauman
"You can't figure out the Bible by reading the New York Times Headlines." -Dr. Bauman
"When a prophecy fails, people never admit they're wrong, they just recalculate… every freaking time." -Dr. Bauman
"You were already confused, and these questions have revealed it… You're welcome." -Dr. Bauman
"Is your patron saint a parrot?" -Dr. Bauman
"Despite your prayers and mine, I'm back…" -Dr. Bauman
"Phil, I can forgive almost everything… almost…" -Dr. Bauman
"One out of four isn't bad… it's like most of your tests…" -Dr. Bauman
Annie: "Do you lie to us?" Dr. Bauman: "If I said 'yes', you couldn't believe me and if I said 'no' it would be a lie…"
"I believe that poem is a piece of shit.. Its one of the stupidest things written in English… it’s a piece of dog dodo… Vulgarity should not mean but be…" -Dr. Bauman
Damiya: "Is that oxymoron?" Dr. Bauman: "I can see the moron part..."
"Ever seen a wordless poem? There one is now!" -Dr. Bauman
"Next time you have your computer open to a poem, hit the delete button- there's Archibald McLeish…" -Dr. Bauman
"You saw him [Dr. Williams] dress for volleyball- you know he makes mistakes… I don't even want to look at that fish very long…" -Dr. Bauman
Annie: "I'll give you an example…" Dr. Bauman: "And I'll give you an evasion…"
“STARE AT THE FISH- IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!!!” –Dr. Bauman
"I never thought I would say this, but, Wendy is right!" -Dr. Bauman
Annie: "You don't heart NY?" Dr. Bauman: "No, no- I flee New York!"
"Meditate- that's the secret of the universe?" -Dr. Bauman
"For one thing Phil, 'Republican idiots' is redundant." -Dr. Bauman
"Senile people are citizens… why shouldn't Moreland vote?" -Dr. Bauman
"I'll see you tonight- consider yourself warned!" –Dr. Bauman
"I think that human being are capable of reason but are rarely ever rational." -Dr. Bauman
“The reason Socrates was so far ahead of everyone is that he knew that he didn't know anything...” –Dr. Bauman
"If you were a Phillies fan you wouldn't take their name in vain…" –Dr. Bauman
“John McCain couldn't debate his way out of paper bag.” –Dr. Bauman
"Time may come to an end…" –Dr. Bauman
“He was a flute player in fact… but he was still a Christian.” –Dr. Bauman
“He's a lawyer, a politician, and a saint- how many of those are there?” –Dr. Bauman
"No wonder you can't find it- the idiot up front can't tell nine from ten…" -Dr. Bauman referencing the fact that he told us to look in the wrong book of Paradise Lost.
"He's saying 'Who does God think He is? God?'" –Dr. Bauman (In reference to Satan talking about God in Paradise Lost.)
"I wonder what constitutes 'inglorious' if being thrown into hell doesn't count…" -Dr. Bauman (Referencing Satan speaking in Paradise Lost.
“Never mistake being a good theologian for being a good Christian. You can be a really good theologian and a bad Christian.” –Dr. Bauman
“Truth isn’t a thing- it's a person. Look for “HIM”, not “It”. You can be thinking about God all day long and still be rebelling against Him.” –Dr. Bauman
"Life is like running though a mine-field with clown shoes on…" -Dr. Bauman
“The truth…. Satan's a democrat.” –Dr. Bauman
Phil: “I'm Satan!”
Dr. Bauman: “I Know!”
“Welcome to the special broadcast of the Precious Nation- I don't know…Thanks for tuning in!” –Dr. Bauman
"It's Friday the 13th! Beware of black cats, mirrors, Bauman, ladders, barbed wire… and the color purple." -Unknown
"Men are pigs... or ballerinas…" -Dr. Bauman
"Let's tone it down to a quite roar…" -Dr. Bauman
"I am the world’s foremost authority on all manner of things." -Dr. Bauman
“Phil- you're good at worship, you're just not good at picking Gods...” –Dr. Bauman
"Abby, you can't have an extreme brain makeover if you don't have a brain…" -Dr. Bauman
“Do you see Armageddon as literal or does it occur in a highly symbolic book, such as Revelation?” –Dr. Bauman
“If guilt is by association, then the two people next to you are evil...” –Dr. Bauman
“I missed the section of the Bible where there are cow commandments...” –Dr. Bauman
“Theology is like education- it’s going to be painful, but worth it.” –Dr. Bauman
“When we go home, it will be easy for us to make enemies. We've made a lot of progress and we're going to want to talk to people and show you what you know- and they'll hate your guts. We need to prove first of all that we're still good people, but not that we're pains in the butt. We need to be the first us, and not the second coming of Bauman.” –Dr. Bauman
Annalisa: "I'm a little confused…"
Dr. Bauman: "I know…"
Hope: "Is Don Williams married?"
Dr. Bauman: "No…"
Hope: "Oh Good!"
“Do you believe in order to understand or to you understand in order to believe?” –Dr. Bauman
"Just remember Sterling that cowardice is not a Christian virtue…" -Dr. Bauman
"I'm a no-point Calvinist. Which isn’t the same as a pointless Calvinist, which is redundant…" -Dr. Bauman
“Some people are born to be Marines… I was born not to be…” –Dr. Bauman
“You have to start in the right place in order to end in the right place…” –Dr. Bauman
“I said that he’s more Catholic than the Catholics- you're a protestant… and that horrifies him…” –Dr. Bauman
“You need to do theology the right way in order to get the correct answers… you have to ask the right Questions in order to get the right answers...” –Dr. Bauman
Eric: “Who do you fear more, Bauman or God?” Mack: “God has mercy.”
“Libby- someday you’ll be dead… Oh Happy Day!” –Dr. Bauman
“If you ever meet someone else like Bauman… run!” –Eric Smith
Friday, February 12, 2010
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Hazards of Reading on the Battlefield
Here's the full article by Walt Russell that Stonestreet encouraged us to read... enjoy!
The Hazards of Reading on a Battlefield
Walt Russell
As she worked her way toward the front of the room, I could tell the young woman was really angry at me. Her eyes were blazing and her jaw was set. This was surprising because the setting was fairly benign: speaking to a large evangelical church’s singles group on “How to Interpret the Bible.” At the beginning of my two times with them, however, I was already offending the troops! I braced myself.
Twenty-four year-old “Janet” (not her real name) was angry at my emphasis on seeking to discover authors’ intentions when we read their texts. She was an evangelical Christian and a second grade teacher in a public school. She prided herself in helping her 20 students learn to love literature. She would read them a story as they gathered around her, and then ask each child, “What does the story mean to you?” She prodded them to come up with their own unique meanings. With such strong encouragement, the class of 20 would eventually have 20 different meanings for the one story. Janet sensed that I was a naysayer about such “love of literature.” Pouring a little emotional gasoline on the fire, I said, “Janet, you’re certainly doing your part to insure that these 7 year-olds will never recover from a radically relativistic view of meaning!” Now I had her full attention.
Actually, Janet’s and my little story about where a text’s meaning resides is really part of a larger, more tangled story that’s over a hundred years old. It started with some American literary critics early in the 20th century who shifted the focus from the author to the text. This literary perspective, later called “New Criticism,” banished the author and focused instead on a “close reading” or “explication” of the text. When created, a text supposedly becomes an artifact with autonomy and a life of its own. The autonomous text’s meaning is discovered by studying its organic unity. New Criticism triumphed in the United States from about 1930 to 1960. As the text moved into the spotlight, authors were shuffled to the periphery.
But to understand Janet’s and my little discussion we need to know the story from 1960 to the present. This is because the movement away from authors did not stop at the text. Rather, it continued its movement all the way to us as readers. In the last 40 years, reading and interpreting has been redefined from seeking the intentions of authorsthrough reading their texts to continually recreating the text through the presuppositions of readers. Since the 1960s the emphasis has shifted to the astonishing assumption that readers not only create the meaning, but also in some sense create the text itself through the contouring of their presuppositions! With this view none of us can really share the same text!
The classical view of meaning is that a text is a window into an author’s intentions. For example, we peer through the window of the biblical text to interpret what the Divine and human authors intend to say. By contrast, the Postmodern sense is that a text is a mirror by which readers generate meaning. Janet was holding up a mirror to her second graders and encouraging them to generate their own meanings in light of their own images. The irony is that this does not teach a “love of literature,” but rather fosters a narcissistic fascination with one’s own thoughts! If this is how Christians interpret the meaning of the Bible, then we are trapped within our own mirrors — our own set of presuppositions. We are not hearing God’s voice, only our own. We are trapped inside our own heads.
The first problem with this view of meaning is that any positive presentation of it is self-refuting. In order to communicate “readers create meaning,” relativistic authors have to scab off of the real world and the way meaning actually works to communicate their relativistic ideas. In other words, they expect us to interpret accurately their authorial intention that readers can’t get to authorial intention! Or approach it from another perspective: If you’re a student, ask your professor who expounds this view of meaning to reread your paper on which she gave you a D until she creates a meaning for it worthy of an A. Say that it’s unfair that she graded you harshly for her poor reader-generated meaning! No one can live a world where readers generate meaning because it doesn’t exist.
Another problem with the present relativism in meaning in the West is the very fact that it is in the West. The 30 percent of the world that lives in the West has reaped the bitter fruit of a 500-year march toward extreme individualism. Those of us born right after World War II have reached the lunatic fringe in living out a radical and narcissistic self-absorption. It has destroyed our marriages, families, churches, national cohesion, and meaningful sense of community.
The good news is that our children have sensed the futility of this radical perspective and are saying, “No mas. We don’t want to deny the group dimension of ourselves anymore. We want to have meaningful connections with one another. We want to have stable community and long-lasting relationships.”
Good move. Now simply stop denying the corporate dimension of language too! Recognize that words, ideas, and genres are public, sharable things that we use in order to communicate with one another. While an individual intersects with them, the components of language are essentially group-oriented things. They make individual communication possible. While we complicate the interpretive process with our individual presuppositions, they are not an insurmountable barrier. We simply recognize the “fuzzing” that our presuppositions can cause and seek to use good interpretive methods to transcend any clouding they may bring.
The Church in the West has been deeply impacted by this misunderstanding of meaning. We need go no further than the main question we ask when interpreting the Bible: “What does this verse mean to you?” The trickle-down of a century of bad interpretive theories has led to our widespread relativistic interpretation of the Bible. We have been profoundly wounded in the midst of the spiritual warfare that has surrounded the issue of meaning. Our anti-intellectualism has actually increased the casualty list. Another culprit is our naiveté about the setting in which we read. We read right in the middle of a remarkable spiritual battlefield. While the casualties are initially more subtle, they are ultimately more obvious. The spiritual warfare is blazing around us. It has effectively neutralized the greatest wealth of Bible study resources available in the history of the Church. Not by preventing their publication, but by undercutting their usefulness with a relativistic view of meaning! Why do I need a Bible dictionary to help determine Paul’s meaning in Philippians 1:6 if the ultimate trump card is what it means to me? How brilliantly diabolical and strategic such a view of meaning is. It effectively cuts us off from God’s voice and imprisons us within our own voice. It is Satan’s ancient question, “Indeed, has God said? ... ” in postmodern dress.
Perhaps it is no overstatement to imagine that when you pick up your Bible and start reading it, you are instantly transported to the field of spiritual battle. Perhaps that funny odor is not burning pizza but flaming arrows; perhaps you need to avoid being a casualty! Probably not a bad idea also to be fighting for the right army! These are just some of the hazards of reading on a battlefield.
“INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” — the newspaper headline virtually screams out at you. The thought of something being slain is repulsive. You’re gripped by a mental image of southern India’s Bengal tiger. You imagine its beautiful face, its stripes and piercing eyes. Then your image is shattered by the sudden blast of a high-powered rifle. You see the exquisite creature writhe in pain, fall gracelessly in its tracks and die. Having read no further than the headline, you feel sick, as if you’ve witnessed something tragic.
But should you feel this way? The slaughter of an endangered species — especially one as magnificent as the Bengal tiger — is horrifying, no doubt. But suppose you failed to notice that the headline “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” appeared in the sports page of the morning paper. Clearly enough, it now refers to different Indians, different Tigers and a different manner of slaying than you originally thought. And is it really that tragic that the Cleveland Indians badly beat the Detroit Tigers in a major league baseball game last night? Not unless you’re a long-suffering Detroit Tigers’ baseball fan. But how do you now know that the headline is about baseball and not tiger-slaying in India? You look at the words “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS” and you know exactly what each word means. When you combine these words, how can they not mean exactly what you first thought they did — that Indians slay tigers? Answer: because their meanings are communicated (as the meanings of all words are) through genres!
Whether we recognize that we are doing so or not, we interpret all things in life, from casual conversations to scholarly articles, in terms of their perceived genres or types of communication. When we develop an ability to discern cues within a text that indicate what kind of literature we’re working with and what to expect (or not to expect) from it, we have achieved what some call “literary competence.” We develop literary competence by growing up in a culture and learning its various genres — its various styles of communication. If we have literary competence, after reading “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” in the sports page, we would never picture tigers in India because we would instantly know that correct interpretation within this genre requires assuming that “TIGERS” and “INDIANS” refer toteams rather than people from India and large stripped cats. Our interpretation of any section in the newspaper begins instantaneously when we recognize the genre and adjust our expectations accordingly. The beauty of genres is that they are public, sharable forms of communication that immediately enable the understanding of meaning. Genres are one of God’s enduring gifts of common grace that help us communicate to one another with accurate understanding.
The words of the Bible are God-breathed, by the Holy Spirit, into the human-crafted genres exhibited in the Bible. We find every God-breathed word of Scripture within a genre. Because genres set limits on our possible interpretations of words, if God had not placed the words of Scripture within genres, we wouldn’t understand one word of the Bible. So God has spoken to us “in many portions and many ways” (Hebrews 1:1) through particular biblical genres such as historical narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, apocalyptic literature, prophecy, gospels, letters, parables, and on and on. If our literary competence with the Bible approaches the literary competence we have with the morning newspaper, we should be able to jump into any part of the Scriptures and interpret its words accurately. But sadly, much of our Bible-reading parallels our weeping for Bengal tigers after reading a headline in the sports section of the newspaper!
In front of a large adult fellowship in an evangelical church, I recently spoke on the topic of being genre-sensitive in reading the Bible. To illustrate, I turned to Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I asked, “Can we claim this as a promise for parents?” The hemming and hawing began. Most assumed that we could claim it as a promise and had, in fact, done so many times! To provoke them a bit further, I shared a proverb from American history — early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. “Anyone want to claim that as a promise?” I asked, rhetorically. “No. Why not? … Because it’s a proverb,” I said, answering my own question. “Then why do you think that you can change a biblical proverb into a promise?” I anticipated the answer that eventually emerged from the fog: “Because this proverb about child-raising is in the Bible!” I deadpanned, “So what?” Their response: “God can supernaturally do whatever He wants in the Bible.”
True, God can do whatever He wants, in the Bible and elsewhere. If He wants, God can tell us how to make lasagna through the gospel of John, tell us that Christ died for our sins through a cookbook and, of course, promise the salvation of our kids through Proverbs 22:6. But how is this relevant? If their answer is correct and we can change God’sproverbs into promises, then we really have no idea what God is saying in Proverbs, do we? If Proverbs 22:6 isn’t a proverb (or is a proverb, but doesn’t need to be interpretedas a proverb), then we don’t know what it is or how to interpret it. Having no limit for its possible interpretation, it can morph into whatever we want it to be. It really has no genre except what we choose to give it, based on our present needs. One person can make it a promise, another can make it a riddle, and the cynical, burnt out parent can make it an ironic joke. Without genre, it’s amorphous and meaningless, and we really don’t know what God intended to say. What it does provide, however, is an occasion for us to craft God’s words into whatever words we want to hear!
Hopefully, those of you familiar with such methods of interpretation get the idea of how foolish and dangerous much of our Bible reading has become. It is another example of the tragic shift in interpretive focus from seeking authors’ intentions to unpacking readers’ presuppositions. When we ignore genres in the interpretive process, we are ignoring one of the most important aids to understanding. Why? Because genres are one of those community thingsthat authors and readers must share if they want to communicate clearly and efficiently with one another. When I ignore the chosen genre of a biblical passage, I effectivelyindividualize and privatize the interpretive process and jerk the Bible out of everybody else’s hands. Whether I’m teaching the passage or reading it, I have taken it out of the public arena where we can share and discuss its meaning.
The personal cost of ignoring biblical genres may also be great. I can still picture a distinguished, older gentleman I conversed with two decades ago. We were studying Proverbs that Saturday and I had just claimed that proverbs are not promises but instances of wisdom literature that emphasize wise choices. I used the example of Proverbs 22:6 and the earnest but erroneous claiming of that proverb by parents as a promise in child-rearing. The dear fellow literally stood up from his chair, red-faced and flustered. He and his wife had two boys who appeared to trust Christ as children but wandered from the faith as teenagers and had not returned as adults. As faithful parents, he and his wife had gotten on their knees and prayed for their wayward sons several times each week, claiming the “promise” of their return in Proverbs 22:6 for over 20 years! In the midst of their parental pain over the eternal well being of their sons, they took comfort in the “promise” of Proverbs 22:6. Imagine the disillusionment in God and His “promises” that would inevitably accompany their years of false hope if their sons never returned to the Lord. What’s worse, the pain and disillusionment were due to some well-intentioned but genre-ignoring saint who made a proverb into a promise — somewhere in the process of interpreting Proverbs 22:6, God’s words became his words and God’s intended meaning was distorted.
Such, however, does not have to be the case if we will brake for the genres of the Bible. As the diversity of biblical literature testifies, God seems to.
“Never Read a Bible Verse!” That’s the title of a little booklet my friend and Christian radio personality, Gregory Koukl, has written to help people read the Bible well. What great advice. “That’s right, never read a Bible verse. Instead, always read a paragraph — at least.” But the current is flowing the other way in our popular sound-bite culture. Not to be left out (or left behind!), the Church has its own version of sound-bite culture: verse-bite culture. In verse-bite culture we take a sentence or sentence-fragment from a biblical paragraph, memorize it out of context, write it on a little card, put it on a billboard, a plaque, a rock, etc. Somehow we think that just because this little chunk of Scripture has a verse number in front of it, it was meant to be a free-standing unit of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Apart from the fact that chapter and verse divisions weren’t added to the New Testament text until 1560 — long after the New Testament’s inspired authorship — there is a more important reason for never reading just a Bible verse, and instead reading at least the paragraph that contains it.
By nature, meaning comes from the top down, from a text’s larger units to its smaller ones. The paragraph is there because of the whole text’s thesis. The sentence (or “verse”) is there because of the paragraph’s thesis. The word is there because of the sentence’s thesis. You get the idea. The contours of the larger units of a text determine the meaning of its smaller units. This is also the way our minds work — from the big idea down to its smaller parts. The same is true of the Bible. A biblical sentence (verse) is simply a part of a paragraph and develops some aspect of the paragraph’s big idea. Therefore, the minimal unit of thought to read is the paragraph. A wise Bible reader will learn to think in terms of paragraphs and will regularly ask, “What’s the big idea of this paragraph?”
Let’s test this approach to reading the Bible by looking at a well-known verse of Scripture, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 — “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” I confess that whenever I encounter this verse, I picture old, withered saints shaking their bony fingers in younger believers’ faces and exhorting them about some questionable behavior. In this recurring scenario, the godly, mature Christians find it necessary to exhort the younger saints not because they have done something that actually is evil, but simply because they behaved in a manner that could have theappearance of being evil. I think I just had a couple of flashbacks!
This understanding of the teaching of 1 Thessalonians 5:22 can be traced back to the King James Version of 1611. The KJV chose the word “appearance” for the Greek word eidos, which means visible form, outward appearance, kind orsort. Since this translation appeared, well-intentioned Christians have focused only on the “outward appearance” aspect and concluded that we are not only to avoid evil, but we are also to avoid anything what could outwardly appearto be evil. Hence, the genesis of the widely used ethical dictum, “Avoid every appearance of evil.” However, there are multiple problems with this interpretation.
One is that it doesn’t fit into the big idea of the paragraph containing it. In fact, this understanding is totally tangential to the paragraph’s big idea. Let me briefly explain.
1 Thessalonians is the Apostle Paul’s letter to a group of new Christians being persecuted by their fellow citizens in northern Greece. It’s an adversarial context for the church, so Paul spends much of his time defending his church-planting team’s integrity and actions in chapters 1-3. In chapters 4-5 (“the moral exhortation” section), he addresses five successive threats to the life of this church body. 1 Thessalonians 5:12-22 addresses the fifth and final significant issue facing this fledgling band of Christians.
Verses 12-22 deal broadly with the concerns that arise when the church gathers for her weekly assembly. Paul gives instructions about fostering healthy church body life in this context by rightly esteeming leaders (verses 12-13), dealing sensitively with the saints’ varying needs (verses 14-15), establishing a joyful assembly (verses 16-18), and not squelching the ministry of the Holy Spirit in prophetic utterances in the assembly (verses 19-22). Note that verse 22 helps develop the exhortation about prophecy in the church. While the paragraph covers a broad range of issues, these issues coherently develop the big idea of “what our body life should look like when the church gathers.”
By briefly working our way down from the broader context of the whole letter to the paragraph (5:12-22), we’re now ready to look at the immediate context for verse 22. Notice the logical flow of the argument about prophetic utterances in verses 19-22:
“19 Do not quench the Spirit;” — This is the general exhortation of the argument.
“20 do not despise prophetic utterances.” — A specific NEGATIVE aspect of the exhortation.
“21 BUT examine everything carefully;” — A contrasting POSITIVE aspect of the exhortation.
“hold fast to that which is good;” — What we should do with GOOD prophecies after examining them.
“22 abstain from every form of evil.” — Or “abstain from every evil form of utterance.” — This is what we should do with EVIL prophetic utterances.
Note that the topic is very specific. It is about the specific topic of prophetic utterances when the church officially gathers. As is generally the case with Scripture, God and the human authors are very specific in their discussions. They seldom sprinkle broad moral sayings like “avoid every appearance of evil” in free-standing fashion. Rather, they usually speak in a closely argued style developing a big idea, especially in the New Testament letters. Such is the case with 1 Thessalonians 5:22. Paul is exhorting the young Christians at Thessalonica to stay away from every evil prophetic utterance. However, by removing verse 22 from its very specific paragraph development, we abstract the language from its tightly reasoned moorings and create a much more general, vague concept — a verse-bite. (Yes, in a nice tone, I’ve just said that we distort God’s words and thoughts!) This seems to be an enormous price to pay for not taking a few extra seconds to read the unit of thought — at least the paragraph — containing the verse in question. The Bible’s big ideas are expressed in the big ideas of its paragraphs and we should attend to them.
Moreover, if 1 Thessalonians 5:22 is a broad, moral dictum, did Jesus avoid every appearance of evil? I think not! One of His constant criticisms at the hands of religious people was that He spent time with “defiling people” like tax gatherers, swindlers, irreligious people (“sinners”), and probably even prostitutes. Though He was perfect, sinless — though He never did anything that was actually evil — by the standards of the religious, Jesus seemed regularly to have theappearance of evil. But perhaps this is the accusation we must bear along with Jesus rather than inappropriately withdrawing from the sin-scarred people in our lives. Perhaps this is also part of our rebuke at the hands of those who don’t read 1 Thessalonians 5:22 in context. Perhaps this is part of the bitter fruit of a verse-bite Christian culture.
I was staring into the open grave of my son Christopher. It was an unspeakably painful moment. The nightmare all parents dread had become my life. Had I been physically able to muster more tears, I would have been weeping uncontrollably. As I watched four men struggle to lower a steel lid over the grave vault holding Christopher’s miniature white casket, I realized I would see his little smiling face no more, and run my fingers through his beautiful blond hair never again. We would never snuggle together or touch one another again. Our time together was over. As I stood there, looking into what felt like an abyss, I realized that I was in the most despairing, skeptical, and faithless state I had ever been in. I felt like cursing God for the rest of my life. I was on the edge of the dark, bottomless pit of hell.
The excruciating pain of my son’s death was a defining moment for me, profoundly shaping my view of God’s Word. Previous to that moment, while God’s Word had been central to my life, I thought its primary purpose was to give me guidance and doctrinal stability. While I knew His Word was about real human experiences (like suffering and death), it had seemed flat, two-dimensional, like a blueprint or a map. To me, it had been little more than a divinely inspired collection of information. I had experienced no great loss or defeat in life up to that point, and I even thought that 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (which deals with the death of loved ones) was about nothing more than the timing of Christ’s return. “Sure, a few Christians in Thessalonica died, but that was simply an occasion for Paul to teach about the end-times.”
Over the years, I had logged quite a bit of time studying 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, trying to understand it. I sought to comprehend the Apostle Paul’s teaching about the relationship between death and Christ’s coming for His church. I struggled to know the facts about Jesus’ raising the dead at the rapture of the church, and once I knew these facts, I even meditated upon them. In other words, I laid abasis of knowledge about this part of God’s Word. And part of my knowledge was the correct application of the passage: “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (verse 18).
In a culture that is rapidly moving into emotivism, the above paragraph is terribly out of step. How dare I use words like “study,” “understand,” “comprehend,” “facts” and “knowledge” when talking about death?
I used these strong, cognitive words intentionally, because one of the purposes of the Word of God is to give usknowledge; we are instructed to learn about the things Scripture recounts. While this isn’t the ultimate end of God’s Word, it is certainly the essential beginning. The Bible has a very real cognitive dimension; knowledge of certain things is absolutely necessary for meaningful living on planet earth. Quite simply, we must know what biblical passages mean before we can apply their meaning to our lives.
As I pondered the fact that my son’s little body was being covered by a steel lid and several feet of dirt, I wondered how God could possibly resurrect his body through such obstacles. It was at this curious, yet horrifying moment that God graciously reminded me of my study of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. I began to ponder with new tear-clouded eyes Paul’s graveside theology for the grieving Thessalonians:
13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 15For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.16For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18Therefore encourage one another with these words. (ESV)
While these verses contained rich truths about the end times, this passage suddenly seemed far more oriented toward families and friends grieving the death of loved ones. It was theology wrapped in real, gritty, painful, emotion-filled experience. It was shaped to address not an abstract and mechanical interest in the end-times, but the tear-stained eyes of believers who had lost their friends and family members, even their children. It was addressed, at that moment, to me. It was God’s Word to me, pulling me back from the abyss of despair and unbelief. It was God’s Word to me, giving me emotional comfort and a hope that could overcome unspeakable tragedy. It was God’s Word to me in my grief, so that I could grieve my heart out, yet “not grieve as others do who have no hope.” In that graveside realization, I learned to apply God’s Word in a very different way. Perhaps I began to apply it in the way God intended, with both my mind and heart, with both my intellect and my emotions. At that moment I learned how desperately I needed to apply God’s Word to my life.
Although it has been almost 22 years since my graveside pondering of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, I continue to unpack the significance of this experience. It was pivotal in helping me wed the informing dimension of the Bible with itstransforming one. My scales had been tipped toward the information/knowledge end and needed to be balanced with the corresponding transformational intention of the Scriptures. It is always a both/and. While my generation has emphasized the Bible’s informing dimension, younger generations are hungering for its transforming dimension. Perhaps my generation’s imbalanced emphasis on knowledge has fueled your generation’s imbalanced emphasis on experience. Neither is complete by itself. We must know the Bible’s information before we can experience the Bible’s transformation. I could never have been comforted by the remarkable truths of Christ’s uniting of loved ones at the "catching-up" of the church without firstknowing those truths. More bluntly, I could never have experienced this timely application of God’s Word in the midst of the darkest moment of my life if I hadn’t first mastered the information about it. It was a grave lesson, but a life-changing one, about application.
The Hazards of Reading on a Battlefield
Walt Russell
As she worked her way toward the front of the room, I could tell the young woman was really angry at me. Her eyes were blazing and her jaw was set. This was surprising because the setting was fairly benign: speaking to a large evangelical church’s singles group on “How to Interpret the Bible.” At the beginning of my two times with them, however, I was already offending the troops! I braced myself.
Twenty-four year-old “Janet” (not her real name) was angry at my emphasis on seeking to discover authors’ intentions when we read their texts. She was an evangelical Christian and a second grade teacher in a public school. She prided herself in helping her 20 students learn to love literature. She would read them a story as they gathered around her, and then ask each child, “What does the story mean to you?” She prodded them to come up with their own unique meanings. With such strong encouragement, the class of 20 would eventually have 20 different meanings for the one story. Janet sensed that I was a naysayer about such “love of literature.” Pouring a little emotional gasoline on the fire, I said, “Janet, you’re certainly doing your part to insure that these 7 year-olds will never recover from a radically relativistic view of meaning!” Now I had her full attention.
Actually, Janet’s and my little story about where a text’s meaning resides is really part of a larger, more tangled story that’s over a hundred years old. It started with some American literary critics early in the 20th century who shifted the focus from the author to the text. This literary perspective, later called “New Criticism,” banished the author and focused instead on a “close reading” or “explication” of the text. When created, a text supposedly becomes an artifact with autonomy and a life of its own. The autonomous text’s meaning is discovered by studying its organic unity. New Criticism triumphed in the United States from about 1930 to 1960. As the text moved into the spotlight, authors were shuffled to the periphery.
But to understand Janet’s and my little discussion we need to know the story from 1960 to the present. This is because the movement away from authors did not stop at the text. Rather, it continued its movement all the way to us as readers. In the last 40 years, reading and interpreting has been redefined from seeking the intentions of authorsthrough reading their texts to continually recreating the text through the presuppositions of readers. Since the 1960s the emphasis has shifted to the astonishing assumption that readers not only create the meaning, but also in some sense create the text itself through the contouring of their presuppositions! With this view none of us can really share the same text!
The classical view of meaning is that a text is a window into an author’s intentions. For example, we peer through the window of the biblical text to interpret what the Divine and human authors intend to say. By contrast, the Postmodern sense is that a text is a mirror by which readers generate meaning. Janet was holding up a mirror to her second graders and encouraging them to generate their own meanings in light of their own images. The irony is that this does not teach a “love of literature,” but rather fosters a narcissistic fascination with one’s own thoughts! If this is how Christians interpret the meaning of the Bible, then we are trapped within our own mirrors — our own set of presuppositions. We are not hearing God’s voice, only our own. We are trapped inside our own heads.
The first problem with this view of meaning is that any positive presentation of it is self-refuting. In order to communicate “readers create meaning,” relativistic authors have to scab off of the real world and the way meaning actually works to communicate their relativistic ideas. In other words, they expect us to interpret accurately their authorial intention that readers can’t get to authorial intention! Or approach it from another perspective: If you’re a student, ask your professor who expounds this view of meaning to reread your paper on which she gave you a D until she creates a meaning for it worthy of an A. Say that it’s unfair that she graded you harshly for her poor reader-generated meaning! No one can live a world where readers generate meaning because it doesn’t exist.
Another problem with the present relativism in meaning in the West is the very fact that it is in the West. The 30 percent of the world that lives in the West has reaped the bitter fruit of a 500-year march toward extreme individualism. Those of us born right after World War II have reached the lunatic fringe in living out a radical and narcissistic self-absorption. It has destroyed our marriages, families, churches, national cohesion, and meaningful sense of community.
The good news is that our children have sensed the futility of this radical perspective and are saying, “No mas. We don’t want to deny the group dimension of ourselves anymore. We want to have meaningful connections with one another. We want to have stable community and long-lasting relationships.”
Good move. Now simply stop denying the corporate dimension of language too! Recognize that words, ideas, and genres are public, sharable things that we use in order to communicate with one another. While an individual intersects with them, the components of language are essentially group-oriented things. They make individual communication possible. While we complicate the interpretive process with our individual presuppositions, they are not an insurmountable barrier. We simply recognize the “fuzzing” that our presuppositions can cause and seek to use good interpretive methods to transcend any clouding they may bring.
The Church in the West has been deeply impacted by this misunderstanding of meaning. We need go no further than the main question we ask when interpreting the Bible: “What does this verse mean to you?” The trickle-down of a century of bad interpretive theories has led to our widespread relativistic interpretation of the Bible. We have been profoundly wounded in the midst of the spiritual warfare that has surrounded the issue of meaning. Our anti-intellectualism has actually increased the casualty list. Another culprit is our naiveté about the setting in which we read. We read right in the middle of a remarkable spiritual battlefield. While the casualties are initially more subtle, they are ultimately more obvious. The spiritual warfare is blazing around us. It has effectively neutralized the greatest wealth of Bible study resources available in the history of the Church. Not by preventing their publication, but by undercutting their usefulness with a relativistic view of meaning! Why do I need a Bible dictionary to help determine Paul’s meaning in Philippians 1:6 if the ultimate trump card is what it means to me? How brilliantly diabolical and strategic such a view of meaning is. It effectively cuts us off from God’s voice and imprisons us within our own voice. It is Satan’s ancient question, “Indeed, has God said? ... ” in postmodern dress.
Perhaps it is no overstatement to imagine that when you pick up your Bible and start reading it, you are instantly transported to the field of spiritual battle. Perhaps that funny odor is not burning pizza but flaming arrows; perhaps you need to avoid being a casualty! Probably not a bad idea also to be fighting for the right army! These are just some of the hazards of reading on a battlefield.
“INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” — the newspaper headline virtually screams out at you. The thought of something being slain is repulsive. You’re gripped by a mental image of southern India’s Bengal tiger. You imagine its beautiful face, its stripes and piercing eyes. Then your image is shattered by the sudden blast of a high-powered rifle. You see the exquisite creature writhe in pain, fall gracelessly in its tracks and die. Having read no further than the headline, you feel sick, as if you’ve witnessed something tragic.
But should you feel this way? The slaughter of an endangered species — especially one as magnificent as the Bengal tiger — is horrifying, no doubt. But suppose you failed to notice that the headline “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” appeared in the sports page of the morning paper. Clearly enough, it now refers to different Indians, different Tigers and a different manner of slaying than you originally thought. And is it really that tragic that the Cleveland Indians badly beat the Detroit Tigers in a major league baseball game last night? Not unless you’re a long-suffering Detroit Tigers’ baseball fan. But how do you now know that the headline is about baseball and not tiger-slaying in India? You look at the words “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS” and you know exactly what each word means. When you combine these words, how can they not mean exactly what you first thought they did — that Indians slay tigers? Answer: because their meanings are communicated (as the meanings of all words are) through genres!
Whether we recognize that we are doing so or not, we interpret all things in life, from casual conversations to scholarly articles, in terms of their perceived genres or types of communication. When we develop an ability to discern cues within a text that indicate what kind of literature we’re working with and what to expect (or not to expect) from it, we have achieved what some call “literary competence.” We develop literary competence by growing up in a culture and learning its various genres — its various styles of communication. If we have literary competence, after reading “INDIANS SLAY TIGERS!” in the sports page, we would never picture tigers in India because we would instantly know that correct interpretation within this genre requires assuming that “TIGERS” and “INDIANS” refer toteams rather than people from India and large stripped cats. Our interpretation of any section in the newspaper begins instantaneously when we recognize the genre and adjust our expectations accordingly. The beauty of genres is that they are public, sharable forms of communication that immediately enable the understanding of meaning. Genres are one of God’s enduring gifts of common grace that help us communicate to one another with accurate understanding.
The words of the Bible are God-breathed, by the Holy Spirit, into the human-crafted genres exhibited in the Bible. We find every God-breathed word of Scripture within a genre. Because genres set limits on our possible interpretations of words, if God had not placed the words of Scripture within genres, we wouldn’t understand one word of the Bible. So God has spoken to us “in many portions and many ways” (Hebrews 1:1) through particular biblical genres such as historical narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, apocalyptic literature, prophecy, gospels, letters, parables, and on and on. If our literary competence with the Bible approaches the literary competence we have with the morning newspaper, we should be able to jump into any part of the Scriptures and interpret its words accurately. But sadly, much of our Bible-reading parallels our weeping for Bengal tigers after reading a headline in the sports section of the newspaper!
In front of a large adult fellowship in an evangelical church, I recently spoke on the topic of being genre-sensitive in reading the Bible. To illustrate, I turned to Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” I asked, “Can we claim this as a promise for parents?” The hemming and hawing began. Most assumed that we could claim it as a promise and had, in fact, done so many times! To provoke them a bit further, I shared a proverb from American history — early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. “Anyone want to claim that as a promise?” I asked, rhetorically. “No. Why not? … Because it’s a proverb,” I said, answering my own question. “Then why do you think that you can change a biblical proverb into a promise?” I anticipated the answer that eventually emerged from the fog: “Because this proverb about child-raising is in the Bible!” I deadpanned, “So what?” Their response: “God can supernaturally do whatever He wants in the Bible.”
True, God can do whatever He wants, in the Bible and elsewhere. If He wants, God can tell us how to make lasagna through the gospel of John, tell us that Christ died for our sins through a cookbook and, of course, promise the salvation of our kids through Proverbs 22:6. But how is this relevant? If their answer is correct and we can change God’sproverbs into promises, then we really have no idea what God is saying in Proverbs, do we? If Proverbs 22:6 isn’t a proverb (or is a proverb, but doesn’t need to be interpretedas a proverb), then we don’t know what it is or how to interpret it. Having no limit for its possible interpretation, it can morph into whatever we want it to be. It really has no genre except what we choose to give it, based on our present needs. One person can make it a promise, another can make it a riddle, and the cynical, burnt out parent can make it an ironic joke. Without genre, it’s amorphous and meaningless, and we really don’t know what God intended to say. What it does provide, however, is an occasion for us to craft God’s words into whatever words we want to hear!
Hopefully, those of you familiar with such methods of interpretation get the idea of how foolish and dangerous much of our Bible reading has become. It is another example of the tragic shift in interpretive focus from seeking authors’ intentions to unpacking readers’ presuppositions. When we ignore genres in the interpretive process, we are ignoring one of the most important aids to understanding. Why? Because genres are one of those community thingsthat authors and readers must share if they want to communicate clearly and efficiently with one another. When I ignore the chosen genre of a biblical passage, I effectivelyindividualize and privatize the interpretive process and jerk the Bible out of everybody else’s hands. Whether I’m teaching the passage or reading it, I have taken it out of the public arena where we can share and discuss its meaning.
The personal cost of ignoring biblical genres may also be great. I can still picture a distinguished, older gentleman I conversed with two decades ago. We were studying Proverbs that Saturday and I had just claimed that proverbs are not promises but instances of wisdom literature that emphasize wise choices. I used the example of Proverbs 22:6 and the earnest but erroneous claiming of that proverb by parents as a promise in child-rearing. The dear fellow literally stood up from his chair, red-faced and flustered. He and his wife had two boys who appeared to trust Christ as children but wandered from the faith as teenagers and had not returned as adults. As faithful parents, he and his wife had gotten on their knees and prayed for their wayward sons several times each week, claiming the “promise” of their return in Proverbs 22:6 for over 20 years! In the midst of their parental pain over the eternal well being of their sons, they took comfort in the “promise” of Proverbs 22:6. Imagine the disillusionment in God and His “promises” that would inevitably accompany their years of false hope if their sons never returned to the Lord. What’s worse, the pain and disillusionment were due to some well-intentioned but genre-ignoring saint who made a proverb into a promise — somewhere in the process of interpreting Proverbs 22:6, God’s words became his words and God’s intended meaning was distorted.
Such, however, does not have to be the case if we will brake for the genres of the Bible. As the diversity of biblical literature testifies, God seems to.
“Never Read a Bible Verse!” That’s the title of a little booklet my friend and Christian radio personality, Gregory Koukl, has written to help people read the Bible well. What great advice. “That’s right, never read a Bible verse. Instead, always read a paragraph — at least.” But the current is flowing the other way in our popular sound-bite culture. Not to be left out (or left behind!), the Church has its own version of sound-bite culture: verse-bite culture. In verse-bite culture we take a sentence or sentence-fragment from a biblical paragraph, memorize it out of context, write it on a little card, put it on a billboard, a plaque, a rock, etc. Somehow we think that just because this little chunk of Scripture has a verse number in front of it, it was meant to be a free-standing unit of thought. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Apart from the fact that chapter and verse divisions weren’t added to the New Testament text until 1560 — long after the New Testament’s inspired authorship — there is a more important reason for never reading just a Bible verse, and instead reading at least the paragraph that contains it.
By nature, meaning comes from the top down, from a text’s larger units to its smaller ones. The paragraph is there because of the whole text’s thesis. The sentence (or “verse”) is there because of the paragraph’s thesis. The word is there because of the sentence’s thesis. You get the idea. The contours of the larger units of a text determine the meaning of its smaller units. This is also the way our minds work — from the big idea down to its smaller parts. The same is true of the Bible. A biblical sentence (verse) is simply a part of a paragraph and develops some aspect of the paragraph’s big idea. Therefore, the minimal unit of thought to read is the paragraph. A wise Bible reader will learn to think in terms of paragraphs and will regularly ask, “What’s the big idea of this paragraph?”
Let’s test this approach to reading the Bible by looking at a well-known verse of Scripture, 1 Thessalonians 5:22 — “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” I confess that whenever I encounter this verse, I picture old, withered saints shaking their bony fingers in younger believers’ faces and exhorting them about some questionable behavior. In this recurring scenario, the godly, mature Christians find it necessary to exhort the younger saints not because they have done something that actually is evil, but simply because they behaved in a manner that could have theappearance of being evil. I think I just had a couple of flashbacks!
This understanding of the teaching of 1 Thessalonians 5:22 can be traced back to the King James Version of 1611. The KJV chose the word “appearance” for the Greek word eidos, which means visible form, outward appearance, kind orsort. Since this translation appeared, well-intentioned Christians have focused only on the “outward appearance” aspect and concluded that we are not only to avoid evil, but we are also to avoid anything what could outwardly appearto be evil. Hence, the genesis of the widely used ethical dictum, “Avoid every appearance of evil.” However, there are multiple problems with this interpretation.
One is that it doesn’t fit into the big idea of the paragraph containing it. In fact, this understanding is totally tangential to the paragraph’s big idea. Let me briefly explain.
1 Thessalonians is the Apostle Paul’s letter to a group of new Christians being persecuted by their fellow citizens in northern Greece. It’s an adversarial context for the church, so Paul spends much of his time defending his church-planting team’s integrity and actions in chapters 1-3. In chapters 4-5 (“the moral exhortation” section), he addresses five successive threats to the life of this church body. 1 Thessalonians 5:12-22 addresses the fifth and final significant issue facing this fledgling band of Christians.
Verses 12-22 deal broadly with the concerns that arise when the church gathers for her weekly assembly. Paul gives instructions about fostering healthy church body life in this context by rightly esteeming leaders (verses 12-13), dealing sensitively with the saints’ varying needs (verses 14-15), establishing a joyful assembly (verses 16-18), and not squelching the ministry of the Holy Spirit in prophetic utterances in the assembly (verses 19-22). Note that verse 22 helps develop the exhortation about prophecy in the church. While the paragraph covers a broad range of issues, these issues coherently develop the big idea of “what our body life should look like when the church gathers.”
By briefly working our way down from the broader context of the whole letter to the paragraph (5:12-22), we’re now ready to look at the immediate context for verse 22. Notice the logical flow of the argument about prophetic utterances in verses 19-22:
“19 Do not quench the Spirit;” — This is the general exhortation of the argument.
“20 do not despise prophetic utterances.” — A specific NEGATIVE aspect of the exhortation.
“21 BUT examine everything carefully;” — A contrasting POSITIVE aspect of the exhortation.
“hold fast to that which is good;” — What we should do with GOOD prophecies after examining them.
“22 abstain from every form of evil.” — Or “abstain from every evil form of utterance.” — This is what we should do with EVIL prophetic utterances.
Note that the topic is very specific. It is about the specific topic of prophetic utterances when the church officially gathers. As is generally the case with Scripture, God and the human authors are very specific in their discussions. They seldom sprinkle broad moral sayings like “avoid every appearance of evil” in free-standing fashion. Rather, they usually speak in a closely argued style developing a big idea, especially in the New Testament letters. Such is the case with 1 Thessalonians 5:22. Paul is exhorting the young Christians at Thessalonica to stay away from every evil prophetic utterance. However, by removing verse 22 from its very specific paragraph development, we abstract the language from its tightly reasoned moorings and create a much more general, vague concept — a verse-bite. (Yes, in a nice tone, I’ve just said that we distort God’s words and thoughts!) This seems to be an enormous price to pay for not taking a few extra seconds to read the unit of thought — at least the paragraph — containing the verse in question. The Bible’s big ideas are expressed in the big ideas of its paragraphs and we should attend to them.
Moreover, if 1 Thessalonians 5:22 is a broad, moral dictum, did Jesus avoid every appearance of evil? I think not! One of His constant criticisms at the hands of religious people was that He spent time with “defiling people” like tax gatherers, swindlers, irreligious people (“sinners”), and probably even prostitutes. Though He was perfect, sinless — though He never did anything that was actually evil — by the standards of the religious, Jesus seemed regularly to have theappearance of evil. But perhaps this is the accusation we must bear along with Jesus rather than inappropriately withdrawing from the sin-scarred people in our lives. Perhaps this is also part of our rebuke at the hands of those who don’t read 1 Thessalonians 5:22 in context. Perhaps this is part of the bitter fruit of a verse-bite Christian culture.
I was staring into the open grave of my son Christopher. It was an unspeakably painful moment. The nightmare all parents dread had become my life. Had I been physically able to muster more tears, I would have been weeping uncontrollably. As I watched four men struggle to lower a steel lid over the grave vault holding Christopher’s miniature white casket, I realized I would see his little smiling face no more, and run my fingers through his beautiful blond hair never again. We would never snuggle together or touch one another again. Our time together was over. As I stood there, looking into what felt like an abyss, I realized that I was in the most despairing, skeptical, and faithless state I had ever been in. I felt like cursing God for the rest of my life. I was on the edge of the dark, bottomless pit of hell.
The excruciating pain of my son’s death was a defining moment for me, profoundly shaping my view of God’s Word. Previous to that moment, while God’s Word had been central to my life, I thought its primary purpose was to give me guidance and doctrinal stability. While I knew His Word was about real human experiences (like suffering and death), it had seemed flat, two-dimensional, like a blueprint or a map. To me, it had been little more than a divinely inspired collection of information. I had experienced no great loss or defeat in life up to that point, and I even thought that 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (which deals with the death of loved ones) was about nothing more than the timing of Christ’s return. “Sure, a few Christians in Thessalonica died, but that was simply an occasion for Paul to teach about the end-times.”
Over the years, I had logged quite a bit of time studying 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, trying to understand it. I sought to comprehend the Apostle Paul’s teaching about the relationship between death and Christ’s coming for His church. I struggled to know the facts about Jesus’ raising the dead at the rapture of the church, and once I knew these facts, I even meditated upon them. In other words, I laid abasis of knowledge about this part of God’s Word. And part of my knowledge was the correct application of the passage: “Therefore encourage one another with these words” (verse 18).
In a culture that is rapidly moving into emotivism, the above paragraph is terribly out of step. How dare I use words like “study,” “understand,” “comprehend,” “facts” and “knowledge” when talking about death?
I used these strong, cognitive words intentionally, because one of the purposes of the Word of God is to give usknowledge; we are instructed to learn about the things Scripture recounts. While this isn’t the ultimate end of God’s Word, it is certainly the essential beginning. The Bible has a very real cognitive dimension; knowledge of certain things is absolutely necessary for meaningful living on planet earth. Quite simply, we must know what biblical passages mean before we can apply their meaning to our lives.
As I pondered the fact that my son’s little body was being covered by a steel lid and several feet of dirt, I wondered how God could possibly resurrect his body through such obstacles. It was at this curious, yet horrifying moment that God graciously reminded me of my study of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18. I began to ponder with new tear-clouded eyes Paul’s graveside theology for the grieving Thessalonians:
13But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 15For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep.16For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18Therefore encourage one another with these words. (ESV)
While these verses contained rich truths about the end times, this passage suddenly seemed far more oriented toward families and friends grieving the death of loved ones. It was theology wrapped in real, gritty, painful, emotion-filled experience. It was shaped to address not an abstract and mechanical interest in the end-times, but the tear-stained eyes of believers who had lost their friends and family members, even their children. It was addressed, at that moment, to me. It was God’s Word to me, pulling me back from the abyss of despair and unbelief. It was God’s Word to me, giving me emotional comfort and a hope that could overcome unspeakable tragedy. It was God’s Word to me in my grief, so that I could grieve my heart out, yet “not grieve as others do who have no hope.” In that graveside realization, I learned to apply God’s Word in a very different way. Perhaps I began to apply it in the way God intended, with both my mind and heart, with both my intellect and my emotions. At that moment I learned how desperately I needed to apply God’s Word to my life.
Although it has been almost 22 years since my graveside pondering of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, I continue to unpack the significance of this experience. It was pivotal in helping me wed the informing dimension of the Bible with itstransforming one. My scales had been tipped toward the information/knowledge end and needed to be balanced with the corresponding transformational intention of the Scriptures. It is always a both/and. While my generation has emphasized the Bible’s informing dimension, younger generations are hungering for its transforming dimension. Perhaps my generation’s imbalanced emphasis on knowledge has fueled your generation’s imbalanced emphasis on experience. Neither is complete by itself. We must know the Bible’s information before we can experience the Bible’s transformation. I could never have been comforted by the remarkable truths of Christ’s uniting of loved ones at the "catching-up" of the church without firstknowing those truths. More bluntly, I could never have experienced this timely application of God’s Word in the midst of the darkest moment of my life if I hadn’t first mastered the information about it. It was a grave lesson, but a life-changing one, about application.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Blogs, You Tube, Texting and the Like...
Hey Ya'll (this is Jake)...
I was pondering Semester (AGAIN) today, and I was trying to think of good ways to stay in touch with ya'll... So, I was wondering if people have public blogs, YouTube accounts, or anything like that so that we can continue to follow each other (in a NON-creepy way... except for maybe Mike)?
And then also, who has texting? I really don't want to text any of you randomly and have you get charged for it...
Thanks guys and gals- I miss you all!!
Jake
I was pondering Semester (AGAIN) today, and I was trying to think of good ways to stay in touch with ya'll... So, I was wondering if people have public blogs, YouTube accounts, or anything like that so that we can continue to follow each other (in a NON-creepy way... except for maybe Mike)?
And then also, who has texting? I really don't want to text any of you randomly and have you get charged for it...
Thanks guys and gals- I miss you all!!
Jake
Mrs. Brown vs. Ted
The pious brown cottage of Miss Ethel Brown
Boasted a window as bright as a clown.
Stained-glass, gaudy, imposing, loud
Only it’s owner was as big and proud.
Skinny and orphaned, Ted from next door,
Who hadn’t had lunch, ‘cause he was too poor
Young Ted had only one friend to his name -
Spot, a friendly and lively great Dane.
One summer day, at nine on the dot,
Ted threw a frisbee for his dog Spot.
Poor Spot leaped for it and crashed
Into Brown’s window which ended up smashed.
Outraged Brown flew out and without a committee
She roared out a verdict that wasn’t too pretty.
Because he was smaller, ’cause he couldn’t best her
Ted wound up sentenced to Summit Semester.
And poor little Spot is no longer around
Because Mack (the dog-catcher) took him to the pound.
Semester ‘09
Boasted a window as bright as a clown.
Stained-glass, gaudy, imposing, loud
Only it’s owner was as big and proud.
Skinny and orphaned, Ted from next door,
Who hadn’t had lunch, ‘cause he was too poor
Young Ted had only one friend to his name -
Spot, a friendly and lively great Dane.
One summer day, at nine on the dot,
Ted threw a frisbee for his dog Spot.
Poor Spot leaped for it and crashed
Into Brown’s window which ended up smashed.
Outraged Brown flew out and without a committee
She roared out a verdict that wasn’t too pretty.
Because he was smaller, ’cause he couldn’t best her
Ted wound up sentenced to Summit Semester.
And poor little Spot is no longer around
Because Mack (the dog-catcher) took him to the pound.
Semester ‘09
Friday, December 4, 2009
A Franciscan Benediction
Hi All,
I got the following prayer, the one we prayed to close our graduation banquet, from the Chaplain at Denver Seminary. I also posted Dr. Noebel's letter on our Summit blog. Blessings, Eric
May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that you may live from deep within your hearts.
May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God's creations
So that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that you may reach out your hands to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with just enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done:
Cry the transforming Gospel of Jesus with your life to the ends of the earth.
Amen.
I got the following prayer, the one we prayed to close our graduation banquet, from the Chaplain at Denver Seminary. I also posted Dr. Noebel's letter on our Summit blog. Blessings, Eric
May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that you may live from deep within your hearts.
May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God's creations
So that you may work for justice, freedom, and peace.
May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that you may reach out your hands to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with just enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done:
Cry the transforming Gospel of Jesus with your life to the ends of the earth.
Amen.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Reviewing our Semester Books
I wrote reviews for them and posted on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2QFKGWWD06BCD/ref=cm_psrch_profile
Enjoy,
Phil C.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A2QFKGWWD06BCD/ref=cm_psrch_profile
Enjoy,
Phil C.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Jake's Final SS Update...
Hey guys- thought I'd be the first one to post...
Below is a copy of my final email update to those at home, I thought you may want to see it... You guys ALL mean so much to me and I miss you all!!
Final Summit Semester Update
Well, I’m back home everyone! I really appreciate all of your support and prayers these past three months while I’ve been out in Colorado.
This past Sunday those of us at Snow Wolf Lodge celebrated Christmas—complete with Christmas tree and gift exchange. A group of us went up about a mile into the National Forest, cut down a white fir tree, and hauled it back up to the lodge. After experiencing some difficulty in getting the tree to stand up straight, the tree was decorated with Christmas roses, white lights, popcorn, and an angel. Our celebration also included cookie decoration, a gingerbread house competition, a Christmas ham, and a white elephant gift exchange. The gift exchange was pretty amazing, with things such as books, food, missing hats, frozen money, a sketch of Bauman, and hot sauce being given as gifts. The festivities concluded with a Christmas classic: “A Muppet Christmas Carol.” And so a great day ended and the last week of our wonderful experience here at Snow Wolf Lodge began.
This past Monday, we had our last Bible class with our Director, Eric Smith. Then Tuesday and Wednesday we had Summit Ministries Director John Stonestreet come and discuss how we’re can better transition back into the ‘real’ world. Wednesday afternoon was preparation for guests (all 70 or so that we were expecting for Graduation). Our Thanksgiving Celebration included food (LOTS of it!), football (and all the fun and soreness that accompanies that), and watching the Denver Broncos whoop the New York Giants.
Friday was graduation day, and a very emotional one in many ways. First of all, Mom arrived in Pagosa Springs at about 11 am, and that was really exciting. Second, we had graduation and all that comes with that- the speeches, tears and high emotions. Lastly, we had some people leaving Friday night, so it was emotional to see them go, knowing that it will be a while before I see them again. Saturday was extremely emotional, as I had to say goodbye to some great friends, with whom I had spent the past three months and had so many great times and memories with. As of now, I am really missing them all in their own ways. I’m glad I’m home and I’m eager to put what I’ve learned into practice, however I grew pretty close to some of these amazing people while I was out there, and it’s hard to leave friends behind…
My time at Summit Semester was fun, exciting, thought-provoking, insightful, and, I believe, life-changing in many ways. I will never forget the friends that I have made, the memories that were created, the questioning and learning that was done, and the great three months that I spent in the middle of nowhere in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. I really see my time there as a true blessing from God. My prayer for all of you reading this is that you grow in your knowledge and love of the Lord Jesus as we have in our three months.
Thank you all so very much- you all mean so much to me! Thanks again for all of your support and prayers these past few months. Enjoy these last few quotes.
In Christ,
Jake Prahlow
Quotes:
"We need to be developing continually a worldview big enough for the world." -John Stonestreet
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