hermeneutics

On “Literal” Interpretation, Part 1: Nobody Does That

October 23, 2023 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

I’ve noticed that our culture seems to think that conservative Christians believe that the Bible should be interpreted literally. I say “our culture seems to think” this because the expression occurs frequently in popular media, whether journalistic or social. I’ve even seen some conservative Christians describe themselves that way.

That’s unfortunate.

Nobody today or in the past has ever interpreted the Bible literally. We’re not Amelia Bedelia.

I wonder sometimes whether those who question the authority of Scripture describe conservatives that way because it makes us sound, well, stupid. But I’ve learned over the decades that impugning motives is a bad idea for many reasons. Although it’s a question the critics should ask themselves.

There’s been a lot written throughout the centuries of church history on the topic of hermeneutics, or biblical interpretation. The preferred approaches have varied considerably over that time, from the imaginative allegorical approach common in earlier times—an approach that is often and rightly ridiculed (see Epistle of Barnabas 9.7)—to word-based approaches common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the more linguistically mature thinking thankfully more common since James Barr published his seminal work The Semantics of Biblical Language forty years ago.

But for centuries, no conservative Christian author on hermeneutics has advocated interpreting the Bible literally. Rather, the standard approach has been to read the Bible the same way you read any other written work: with understanding of stylistic practices, of the idiosyncrasies of translated works, and with attention to the culture from which the document comes—as well as, obviously, the context in which isolated biblical statements are presented.

Thus instruction in hermeneutics routinely includes these sorts of caveats:

Context is king. You know what the author intended a statement to mean by studying and evaluating its context. It’s not legitimate to claim that the Bible says that Judas “went and hanged himself” (Mt 27.5) and “Go, and do thou likewise” (Lk 10.37). Aw, come on, Dan; nobody would actually do that! Well, actually, I’ve seen perversions of context every bit as bad.
The Bible contains false statements. “Ye shall not surely die” (Ge 3.4) is a lie, spoken by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and is contextually identified as such.
The Bible contains phenomenological language, which describes things as they appear to the human senses. Solomon, the wisest man in history, says, “The sun also rises” (Ec 1.5)—and is cited by no less an authority than Ernest Hemingway!—and that is not a scientific error but a figure of speech. A figure, incidentally, that the weatherman uses every day without being characterized as a scientific ignoramus.
The Bible uses pretty much all the recognized figures of speech. (Note that the linked volume runs 1160 pages and was first published in 1898! Nobody takes the Bible literally.) As just one example, Isaiah says that when God consummates history, “all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Is 55.12). Now this clearly does not mean that one day trees will have hands (Ents? Baum’s trees along the way to Oz?) and will also have emotions of joy that they express by clapping. It also doesn’t mean that the wind will blow the leaves of the trees together in ways that sound like clapping. Rather, it’s metaphorical language on multiple levels:
- It uses anthropomorphism in speaking of trees as having hands.
- It uses anthropopathism in speaking of trees having emotions and expressing them by clapping.
- It then uses synecdoche in presenting trees as representing the whole of creation. Paul expresses the idea of the verse in Romans:
  - ¹⁸For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ¹⁹For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope ²¹that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²²For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now (Ro 8.18-22).

So we interpret the Bible like any other work of literature—though that does not imply that it is merely an ordinary work.

Next time: when translating at all is to miss the whole point.

Part 2: Sometimes You Shouldn’t Translate

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 4

December 13, 2018 by Dan Olinger 2 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve asserted my thesis–Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards—and I’ve given a couple of biblical passages that appear to confirm it, as well as an example to give us a more concrete understanding of the principle. Now for the hard question in any assertion—

So what?

I know people who have spent their whole lives trying to understand biblical prophecy. I know others who are troubled, or even disgusted, by the arguments and disagreements that spring from such efforts.

Why can’t we all just get along?

I think the matter we’re discussing here helps us put the modern situation into perspective.

The Bible contains a lot of prophecies that haven’t been fulfilled yet.
In many cases, God has designed these prophecies to be obscure until the time of fulfillment.
Just as Isaiah’s hearers, in trying to imagine a scenario in which Isaiah 53.9 could be fulfilled, would have been very unlikely to imagine what actually happened, so we should expect that our interpretations of the obscure prophecies will be off the mark in ways both minor and significant.
Thus it is likely that believers who love God and his Word and study it deeply will come to different conclusions about what precisely the eschatological material predicts.
The current disagreement is not a problem or evidence of some spiritual failure in the church; it’s exactly what we should expect.

So we have different views at the macroscopic level—

Premillennialists say that we should take prophetic passages just as literally as we take historical passages, because
- Changing hermeneutical horses in the middle of the stream is inconsistent, and
- Prophecies that have already been fulfilled have been fulfilled literally.
Postmillennialists say that if we really want to do that, we need to take literally Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom would come not suddenly, but slowly, over a long period of time (Mt 13.31-33).
And amillennialists say that if we want to take it literally, we’re going to have a problem with 7 heads and 10 horns. If there are clear contextual clues that we shouldn’t take it literally, then we shouldn’t take it literally. And isn’t the new covenant supposed to get away from the physical, literal, external stuff anyway, and move to the inner person of the heart (Jer 31.31-33)? And isn’t Jesus’ kingdom eternal, and not limited to a mere 1000 years (Isa 9.7)?

And even among premillennialists there are differences of interpretation—

Pretribulationists say that if we can be surprised by the Rapture (Mt 25.1-13), then it must be the very next thing to happen on the prophetic timeline.
Midtribulationists say that the Rapture is described as the two witnesses being caught up to heaven (Rev 11.12), at the seventh trumpet judgment (Rev 11.15), the “last trump” (1Co 15.52), at the midway point of the 7-year tribulation.
Posttribulationists say that both believers and unbelievers will be resurrected together at a single return of Christ at the end of the Tribulation (Dan 12.1-3).

Every one of these interpreters has a point. But they can’t all be right.

And maybe, based on what we’ve been discussing, just maybe none of them is completely right.

That means that we have to give one another some room to study, and think, and puzzle, and scratch our heads, and wonder. We need to hear one another’s arguments without making our primary goal to win the argument for our side. We need to approach this puzzle with some sense of historical and hermeneutical understanding, one that holds our own views loosely and humbly, one that waits for the Great Clarity that will come when it all comes to pass.

Humility. Tentativeness. Openness, within the bounds of clear biblical teaching.

Brotherly kindness. Cooperative investigation.

Now, I should say that I’m a pretribulational premillennialist. And I’m pretty sure I’m right. :-)

We ought to study, and think, and try to come to some sort of reasonable conclusion that accounts smoothly for all the biblical data. That’s what theology does, as a matter of stewardship of the great divine gift of the Word. We can’t just sit back lazily and be “panmillennialists—it’ll all pan out in the end.”

But we need to recognize our limits as well, and we need to recognize what those limits say about what kinds of doctrines are worth fighting over, and what kinds aren’t.

Hmmm. Maybe I’ll write about that one of these days.

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 2

December 6, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

In my previous post I’ve stated my thesis:

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

Let me explain my basis for concluding that.

To begin with, this principle is directly stated in both Testaments.

In the Old Testament, we find a description of Daniel receiving a prophecy:

¹At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. ²And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. ³And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12.1-3).

Daniel is then told to “shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end” (Dan 12.4). So God’s intention, in this case, is that the prophecy not be generally distributed. So far, so good.

Then Daniel sees a vision of two men, one of whom asks the other, “How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?” (Dan 12.6b). To which the other responds

that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished (Dan 12.7b).

Perhaps your immediate response is, “Huh?” “Time, times, and a half a time?” What kind of an answer is that? What does it mean?

Well, you’re in good company, because Daniel himself thought the same thing (Dan 12.8a), and he asked for an explanation (Dan 12.8b). And he was told, “Go your way, Daniel, for the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12.9).

In other words, “Never mind; I’m not going to tell you.”

And Daniel is the prophet!

And why is the meaning withheld from the very one who’s supposed to write about it?

Because it’s not for now; it’s for later.

None of your business.

Well, that’s intriguing. God has no intention that anyone, including even the prophet, should understand the prophecy at the time it was given. No one will understand it until it’s fulfilled. Then they’ll understand.

And that’s what God intended all along.

Well, that’s Old Testament. Got anything from the New Testament?

Well, as it happens, I do. Thanks for asking.

In his first epistle, Peter describes the glories of our salvation and the plan of God that brought it about. Along the way he notes that the Old Testament prophets weren’t able to understand those things the way we have been able to (1P 1.10). Specifically, he says, they were puzzled by the apparent conflict between the reigning King, the eternal Son of David (2Sam 7), and the suffering Servant, who was executed without a defense (Isa 53). How could both of those be true of the same person? (1P 1.11).

And Peter notes that God revealed to them “that they were serving not themselves but [us],” who would come later and see those prophecies fulfilled (1P 1.12).

So in these cases, God clearly intended the predictions to be obscure, puzzling.

I should say that I don’t think this was always the case. When Jeremiah prophesied that Judah would be in captivity in Babylon for 70 years (Jer 25.11) and would then return (Jer 29.10), he understood what he was saying, and he intended his hearers to understand as well. He even bought a piece of land and buried the deed (Jer 32.9-15) to show them the kind of confidence that they should have in the Lord’s keeping of this promise.

But it was not at all uncommon for God to give a prophecy that seemed incomprehensible at the time, and he did so intentionally.

Next time we’ll look at an example of such a puzzling prophecy, one that has since been fulfilled. By studying that example we’ll be able to see more concretely how confusing such a prophecy would be initially, but how perfectly clear it would at the time of fulfillment. And that insight may help us understand why God is speaking so obscurely in the first place.

Part 3 Part 4

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Why Prophecy Is Hard—And Why We Disagree, Part 1

December 3, 2018 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

A lot of Christians are confused, and some are even troubled, by biblical prophecy. It seems really hard to understand—what’s with those wheels that Ezekiel saw? and how do you get seven heads and ten horns on a beast? Other Christians are troubled by the fact that nobody can seem to agree on how things are supposed to turn out. Some people have been predicting the Rapture for decades now—and they’ve been wrong every time. And others, who look like perfectly good Christians, chuckle, “Rapture, huh? You don’t really believe that, do you?”

There’s a reason for all this. And when you understand it—the reason, not the prophecies—you’ll realize that there’s really nothing to be upset about.

Let me see if I can clarify some things.

I should begin by defining what I’m talking about. When I say “prophecy,” I’m talking about biblical predictions, places where the Bible says that something’s going to happen in the future. Technically, everything the Bible says is “prophecy,” in the sense that it’s a message from God to humans, delivered through mouthpieces, prophets. But here I’m using the word more narrowly.

The Bible does make a lot of predictions. The first one is in Gen 3.15, where God predicts that “the seed of the woman” will crush the serpent’s head. The last one is Jesus’ statement, “Surely I come quickly,” in Rev 22.20. And there are a lot of them in between.

We can sort them into 2 groups—those that have been fulfilled, and those that haven’t. A great many of those that have been fulfilled are about just 2 events—the exiles of Israel (especially the exile of Judah to Babylon and back) and the first coming of Christ. It can be instructive to study how those prophecies were stated and then how they were fulfilled; I think that study serves as a kind of lab for how we should expect other prophecies to be fulfilled (more on that later).

Most of the ones that haven’t been fulfilled are about the end times—what we call eschatology. And there is where most of the disagreement is among biblical scholars and among everyday Christians.

So why all the disagreement?

I would suggest that it springs primarily from the way God has chosen to give his prophecies.

In short, they’re really hard to understand.

Note that I’ve said that this is “the way God has chosen” to speak to us about these things. The fact that the predictions are obscure is not some kind of defect in God’s ability to communicate, some failure on his part. And I don’t think it’s a problem with our ability to understand, either.

Why do I say that? Because there are all kinds of statements in the Scripture that we understand perfectly well. God can speak clearly when he wants to, and he is completely justified in holding us accountable for those things. He’s told us who we are, where we came from, who he is, and how we can have a relationship with him. These things are clear, and life and death hang on our responding rightly to what he has clearly told us.

But when we cross over into predictive prophecy, it seems as though everything just goes a little crazy. Suddenly we’re knitting our eyebrows, furrowing our foreheads, shaking our heads. Wheel in a wheel in a wheel, indeed.

This stuff is hard. Charles Hodge, the great Princeton theologian of the 19^th century, said frankly that nobody was qualified to interpret biblical prophecy unless he’d spent an entire lifetime doing so—and since he, Hodge, hadn’t, he wasn’t going to make any authoritative pronouncements.

So here’s my thesis.

Biblical prophecy is intentionally designed to be difficult to understand before the time of fulfillment—but to be quite clear afterwards.

God has decided, for reasons of his own, to speak this way. I’ll speculate later on a possible reason for that, but for now I’d like to spend a few posts demonstrating

that my thesis is true,
that it explains the current diversity of views about the end times, and
that it gives us some guidance on how we ought to study and apply these matters.

(If you’re expecting me to finish the series by telling you when Jesus is coming back, you’re going to be disappointed.)

See you next time.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

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On the Theology of Temporal Power

November 8, 2018 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

A while back I posted on the contrast between the weapons of political combat and those of spiritual combat. I argued the obvious point that the latter are more effective than the former, even in political combat. And along the way I stated that political power disappears rapidly and often unexpectedly.

That’s borne out repeatedly and pervasively in Scripture by both assertion (in Proverbs and often elsewhere) and example (throughout the stories of the kings, both Israelite and pagan). Shelley’s Ozymandias taught us nothing new.

A passage that particularly drives home this point is Isaiah 14. The chapter appears toward the beginning of a section on God’s sovereign plan for the nations with whom Judah regularly dealt: Babylon and Assyria, the Big Ones (13-14), Philistia (14.28ff), Moab (15-16), Syria (17-18), Egypt (19-20), Babylon again (21), Edom (21.11ff), Arabia (21.13ff), Israel (22), and Tyre (23).

After describing the military defeat of Babylon in chapter 13, Yahweh turns Isaiah’s prophecy toward the fate of Babylon’s king in chapter 14. His power having been broken, all his old enemies will join in celebrating his collapse (Isa 14.6-8). All the dead will come to mock his arrival at the gates of hell (Isa 14.9). Great and mighty kings, once unimaginably powerful on their earthly thrones, now effete in the realm of the dead, sarcastically welcome his “royal procession” from power to irrelevance (Isa 14.10-11). He who had once sent insufficiently powerful enemies to the grave (Isa 14.6) is now there himself, food for worms (Isa 14.11).

Verse 12 begins a paragraph that many interpreters see as having a double reference, describing the fall of Satan from heaven. I’m not convinced of that. I don’t see anything in the passage that couldn’t be accurate of the king of Babylon. Some point to the words “I will be like the Most High” in v 14, but my response is to ask, “Have you never talked to a politician?” There’s nothing in the reported words of the king that any US Senator hasn’t thought.

I think many interpreters are influenced by the fact that God here calls the king “Lucifer,” an accepted name for Satan. But I note that this is the only use of the name in Scripture—Satan is never called that anywhere else—and so to use it as evidence that this is Satan is circular reasoning. Since the name simply means “Light-bearer” (as the name Christopher means “Christ-bearer”), there’s no reason it has to apply to Satan. If the king of Egypt thought he was the sun god—as did Louis XIV—it’s not difficult to imagine that the king of Babylon might have called himself the Morning Star, the planet Venus.

So I don’t think “Lucifer” is actually a biblical name for Satan, and I’m inclined to think that what we’re reading here says nothing of Satan but lots about the king of Babylon and, by extension, all earthly kings. (For the detail-obsessive reader, let me answer the question hovering in your mind: I do think Ezekiel 28, addressed to the king of Tyre, has a double reference to Satan, since the context supports that.)

The upshot of all this is that those who hold political and military power also hold highly exalted opinions of themselves because of that power—opinions that are short-sighted and completely unfounded. Kings, emperors, presidents, and prime ministers all go the way of all flesh. Representative rulers lose their power when their terms expire, and even autocrats and dictators-for-life inevitably die, and regardless of the expense of the state funeral, someone else will take their place, and life will certainly go on for the people over whom they had so much power.

Is this the man that made the earth tremble—that shook kingdoms?! (Isa 14.16).

How shortsighted it is to worship at that altar! How foolish to look there for deliverance!

Come instead—boldly—to the throne of grace (Heb 4.16), to the one seated high upon a throne, whose train fills the temple, a house filled with smoke! (Isa 6.1; Jn 12.41). Come to the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, who was, and is, and is to come! (Rev 1.8).

His kingdom lasts forever, and his will is done to all generations.

Now that’s power.

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